Doubts about Polywater

As he often does on an easy afternoon, Bell Labs Chemist Dennis Rousseau drove to some nearby handball courts last June and played a vigorous game. But this time his purpose was strictly scientific. After returning to work, Rousseau wrung out his sweaty T shirt, collected the perspiration in a flask, evaporated it to a gummy residue, and then carefully analyzed it with an infra-red spectrometer. He found exactly what he was looking for: his sweat exhibited spectral characteristics similar to those of the mysterious and highly controversial substance called polywater.

Ever since it was reported by a Russian chemist named Boris Deryagin in 1962, polywater, or polymerized water,* has been the subject of torrid scientific debate. Deryagin and his supporters in the West contend that it is a totally new kind of water, a form so stable that it does not boil under 1,000DEG F., does not evaporate, and only begins to freeze at --40DEG F. One American scientist has even speculated that the strange, sticky substance would, if released from the lab, propagate itself by feeding on natural water, eventually turning the earth into another Venus (TIME, Dec. 19). Other scientists, however, have found all such claims hard to swallow.

Clinging Salts. Rousseau, 29, was one of the skeptics. But it was not until he read a recent article about polywater in the Soviet scientific journal Khimiya i Zhizn (Chemistry and Life) that he got the idea for his simple test.

Challenged by critics to let impartial scientists analyze his polywater, Deryagin had turned over 25 tiny samples of the substance to investigators of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of Chemical Physics. The results, which were published in the journal, showed that Deryagin's polywater was badly contaminated by organic compounds, including lipids and phospholipids, which are ingredients of human perspiration.

Vodka Glass. How could so skilled a chemist have allowed sweat to contaminate his equipment? The explanation is simple, says Purdue University Chemist Robert Davis, who collaborated with Rousseau and confirmed his conclusions with other analytic techniques. Every person is surrounded by an invisible cloud of organic salts that have evaporated from the skin and been expelled from the lungs; these tiny pollutants may well be absorbed by the porous glass of laboratory beakers and flasks. Thus polywater--which is made by letting steam condense inside hair-thin glass tubes--could pick up impurities even in the hands of the most cautious chemist. In fact, investigators who have tried to make polywater in polyethylene plastic tubes have invariably failed, Davis notes, because polyethylene is nonporous and cannot trap particles.

Deryagin himself remains unbowed. At a recent polywater conference at Lehigh University, he acknowledged that his original specimens may have contained impurities, but insisted that polywater continues to exhibit its strange properties after the contaminants have been removed. Deryagin and his supporters will have a hard time proving their case until more polywater exists. Currently, the total amount available from all the world's labs would hardly fill a vodka glass. Davis, for one, doubts whether anyone should sweat over the problem any longer. "American scientists have been wasting their time studying this subject," he wrote in Chemical & Engineering News, "unless, of course, it can be defined as a topic of water pollution and waste disposal."

* So called because its molecules are believed to be linked in a chemical chain, or polymer.

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