Cellulose Explained

Last week two women scientists explained how plants build the cellulose membranes that form cell walls, a process of vital interest to textile technologists. Unable to see how plants manufacture their cellulose, botanists have supposed for a long time that the membranes were laid down in particles too small to be seen under the microscope. Researchers could estimate the molecular weight of cellulose at something around 162. but they could not find the exact weight, or the melting point of the pure substance, or the molecular architecture.

Mrs. Wanda Kirkbridge Farr of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and Miss Sophia H. Eckerson of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Yonkers, N. Y. launched an intensive chemical drive on cotton fibres, which are almost pure cellulose. When they soaked the fibres in strong hydrochloric acid, the cellulose structure came visibly apart under powerful microscopes. The particles, it turned out, had not been too small to see but were hidden by a cementing substance that the acid dissolved. There were football-shaped bodies some .00006 in. long. As the cell wall was built the particles formed compact strands like strings of sausages, and as string after string was laid down on the cell wall they merged so neatly with the gelatinous cement that the structure looked completely homogeneous unless the cement were dissolved. Aware now of the double structure of cellulose and able to study the two components separately, organic chemists should be able to fill in the cellulose unknowns in short order.

Wanda Kirkbridge Farr (in private life Mrs. R. C. Saulwetter) is a shapely, well-dressed, vivacious cytorogist (cell anatomist) who got her master's degree at Columbia, did skin & cancer research in St. Louis, taught botany there, experimented for a time at the Boyce Thompson Institute, is now a government cotton technologist. Dr. Sophia H. Eckerson got her Ph. D. at University of Chicago, is a learned, shy spinster not far from 60. has been at Boyce Thompson for 14 years, is known to colleagues male & female as a clever and learned worker with plants.

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