Chemists at Chapel Hill

Laymen who hear scientists indulging in polysyllabic shop talk are likely to regard them as cloistered visionaries who pay scant attention to what is going on in the workaday world. Last week, however, a bevy of savants approaching Chapel Hill, N. C., showed that they at least glance at the front pages of their newspapers. The American Chemical Society was holding a convention at the University of North Carolina. The chemists detrained at Durham, where arrangements had been made to convey them by bus the twelve miles to Chapel Hill. In the line of special busses waiting at the Durham station was a regular bus whose route missed the university by half a mile. Some 25 scientists, including General Electric Co.'s Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir, heedlessly climbed aboard this bus, were driven off.

No formal report of what happened next was drawn up and informal stories varied. According to one version, when the driver reached the nearest point on his route to the scientists' destination and asked them to get out, they refused. One said: "We will have a sitdown strike." When the driver threatened to remove them and their baggage from his vehicle by force, a strike committee pointed out that the energy output involved in any such procedure would be greater than that required to take them to the university. The driver yielded to this logic, drove his passengers to Swain Hall.

Films & Jellies. Dr. Langmuir held the chemists spellbound when he recounted his tricks with "monofilms''--layers of matter only one molecule thick. Certain oils, fats and proteins will spread out in monofilms on water whose surface has been scraped clean. The molecules have dissimilar ends, "heads" and "tails." Some years ago Dr. Langmuir found that in a monofilm on water, the heads all pointed up, the tails down. Such films resemble crystals in that their structure and dimensions can be learned from their behavior under X-rays and polarized light.*

Last week Dr. Langmuir talked about stearic acid, a substance found in animal fat, which makes a monomolecular film one ten-millionth of an inch thick. This turned out to be an extremely sensitive detector for atoms of metal in water. If the metal atoms are jostled around by stirring the water, they will soon strike the underside of the film, adhere to it. The film is skimmed from the water, allowed to contract. If it contains no metal, when viewed by polarized light it will give a double refraction effect in handsome colors. But if there were only two parts of aluminum, for example, in a billion parts of the water, the refraction effect will not show up./-

Two years ago Dr. Wendell Meredith Stanley of the Rockefeller Institute built a sensational bridge between the living and the nonliving by crystallizing the virus which causes tobacco mosaic disease. Crystallization is a property of nonliving matter but when the virus was applied to the leaf it promptly acquired the ability to reproduce itself--a characteristic of life. The virus is a giant molecule weighing 17,000,000 times as much as a hydrogen atom. Dr. Stanley found the molecule to be spherical, with a diameter of .0000002 cm. When Dr. Langmuir made a monofilm of the virus and then transferred the film to a glass plate where its thickness could be measured, he found that the molecule had flattened out like a pancake and that the film was 15 times thinner than the spherical diameter of one molecule. "This lends support to a theory," said he, "which has recently been advanced that all proteins tend to spread out on surfaces and when they do so they all have a similar lacelike pattern."

The virus molecule's diameter is just under the visibility limit of the most powerful microscopes. Dr. Langmuir made a molecule that anyone could see with the naked eye by adding acetic acid to a dilute solution of sodium silicate. After a while the solution became viscous and turned into a jelly. The molecules had combined to form bigger ones, the process speeding along in geometrical ratio until one super-giant molecule filled the entire container.

EAP. Until recently the two known male hormones were androsterone, first obtained by Butenandt of Germany, and a much more powerful one called testosterone, isolated by Laqueur of The Netherlands. In 1934-35 both of these were synthesized by Ruzicka of Switzerland. Last week Dr. Russell E. Marker and his associates of Pennsylvania State College announced isolation and synthesis of a third male hormone, secreted in the bodies of women.

Nicknamed "EAP" (epi-allo-pregnanolone), the hormone was extracted from pregnancy urine, one-third of an ounce from 10,000 gallons. After its structure was determined, it was easily synthesized from cholesterol, parent substance of other sex hormones. EAP differs from progesterone, a female hormone, only in having four fewer hydrogen atoms. It was administered to a man who had been impotent all his life. After ten days he became potent, and his "condition of ecstasy" lasted three days.

Vitamins. First shown to exist almost a quarter century ago by Elmer Verner McCollum, Vitamin A chiefly occurs in fish oils, oysters, liver, butter, milk, eggs, cheese, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, spinach, watercress. It is necessary for normal growth, eyesight, resistance to infections. By irradiating carotene (yellow pigment substance in carrots), Drummond of England obtained in 1932 a heavy oil which appeared to be pure Vitamin A. Meanwhile at Oberlin College, Dr. Harry Nicholls Holmes & associates went on trying to isolate the vitamin in crystalline form--a purity tag which chemists believe in. Last November, Dr. Holmes reported last week, pale yellow crystals were frozen out of a wood alcohol solution containing oil from mackerel livers. The crystals disclosed a vitamin potency of 3,000,000 international units, whereas the Drummond noncrystalline concentrates had not exceeded 2,000,000. Dr. Holmes did not, however, find fault with the previously established formula: 20 atoms of carbon, 30 of hydrogen, one of oxygen.

Vitamin B occurs abundantly in rice coats, prevents beriberi, a wasting disease suffered by Orientals who subsist largely on polished rice. After more than two decades of research, Chemist Robert Runnels Williams of Bell Telephone Laboratories extracted about five grams of crystalline Vitamin B from a ton of rice polishings in 1934, synthesized the vitamin last year. Said pipe-sucking Chemist Williams last week: "Experience indicates more and more that the physiological function of Vitamin B is required for the growth and well-being of all living things, both plant and animal. That it operates in higher animals as a promoter of the oxidation of foodstuffs in the body seems very likely, but how and where in the body are largely questions for the future."

Glass Mountains, Platinum Umbrellas. "Such strange things happen to substances dissolved in this solvent that chemists must revise their theories of ionization as applied to acids, bases and salts." Dr. Gilbert B. L. Smith of Brooklyn's Polytechnic Institute was referring to selenium oxychloride, a straw-colored liquid with which he has experimented for five years. An extremely powerful solvent, it reacts with almost everything except tungsten, platinum and glass. It freezes at 65DEG F., has the unique property of turning water into a "base" (opposite of acid).

On earth, water is the common solvent. In a world where selenium oxychloride replaced water, said Dr. Smith, "mountains would consist of glass or feldspar, and all bridges and boats would have to be constructed of platinum or tungsten. Snow would fall every time the temperature dropped below the mild warmth of spring, and when it rained, we should have to carry glass, tungsten or platinum umbrellas. Wooden materials could nowhere be exposed to the weather, since selenium oxychloride is a very powerful oxidizing agent. The temperate zones would be studded with huge glaciers of white crystals. Ice would pile up from early autumn to late spring, and when the thermometer rose with the gentle warmth of early summer, rivers and streams would become torrents of the fuming, corrosive liquid. Animals would have to have glass-lined stomachs to drink the stuff.

"Once some of it froze overnight, broke its containers, and dripped on the wooden floor of one of the laboratories at the Institute and it ate right through and dripped down into a physics laboratory below. There it destroyed several instruments and even attacked bakelite fixtures."

*Light filtered so that it vibrates in only one plane.

/- Another sensitive detector described last week (by Professor John H. Yoe, University of Virginia) was "ferron," an organic compound whose full name is seven-iodo-eight-hydroxyquinoline-five-sulfonic acid. If it is added to a solution containing as little as one part of iron in 10,000,000, a green color will appear.

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