April Pilgrimages

Last week found the U.S. again in the season when scientists come out of their laboratories, blink, stretch and bustle off to share with the world their newest findings. Some of the more newsworthy disclosures at two noteworthy science meetings:

Chemists. Last week some 3,000 academic and industrial members of the American Chemical Society met in St. Louis.

An unusual scientific group, since roughly three-fourths are engaged in business rather than in universities, it found its tongues partly tied this year because a number of new chemical developments are defense secrets.

> How chemical analysis, often a tedious process, can be greatly speeded and simplified by a new method developed in Europe was described by Czech Refugee Alois Langer. Every element and compound conducts electricity through a solution at a distinctive voltage. To find the amount of copper in a solution, the chemist tunes in an electric meter to the known voltage of copper, measures the proportionate amount of current passing through the solution. Complex organic molecules like vitamins and hormones can also be detected and measured.

> A plastic which softens and purifies water for home or industrial use far more efficiently than the silicates now commonly used was announced by Robert James Myers of Resinous Products & Chemical Co. of Philadelphia. Made of resin, this plastic is the first whose chemical, rather than physical, properties are employed.

> From dark, cheap, undesirable tobacco leaves William Turner and Gabriel Goldstein of Columbia University inexpensively removed the desirable tobacco fragrance. This can then be put into the mild, golden leaves with little fragrance now favored by tobacco buyers. Mild leaves now require a factory flavoring of coumarin (from sweet clover) and vanillin. The two chemists predict that cigarets will soon have a genuine tobacco flavor--provided the public likes them that way.

> "Mule feed"--pressed cotton seeds eaten only by the hungriest mules--can be combined with carbolic-acid derivatives to form a new plastic, reported Fritz Rosenthal of the University of Tennessee.

Notable use which he foresees: it may be molded into rifle stocks (now largely hand-turned), releasing machinists for other tasks in arms factories.

> Industrial chemists gasped as Edward Ray Weidlein, chemical priorities director for OPM, observed: "The entire military activities of Germany and Italy, plus the industrial and other activities of these countries and of the occupied areas of Western Europe, are being carried on with an amount of petroleum plus synthetic products which is only about 5% of our present domestic production."

> Several scientists protested that the U.S. people are now becoming foolish vitamin cranks. Said Conrad Arnold Elvehjem of the University of Wisconsin: "The safest program ... is to rely upon the common foods we have been . . . eating rather than attempting the production of cheap, synthetic substitutes.*

>The American Chemical Society's highest honor, the Priestley Medal, awarded triennially, was given to Thomas Midgley Jr. of Worthington, Ohio. After testing 15,000 compounds, Midgley discovered in 1922 that tetraethyl lead in gasoline permits higher compression, higher speed engines. Now vice president of Ethyl Gasoline Corp., he is credited with over 100 patents, including many for air-conditioning refrigerants. In wheel chair and stretcher, Midgley attended last week's meeting, for in September he was stricken with infantile paralysis. But like his close friend, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he is conquering his handicap, still works hard as ever.

Anthropologists. Less peaceful, though less in the shadow of war and industry, was last week's meeting of some 200 members of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago, where they belabored each other in academic rivalry.

> Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu, of Hahnemann Medical College, who looks like Harold Lloyd and has nuisance value among anthropologists because of his irritating lectures, was in fine, irritating fettle. He shocked his colleagues by declaring the whole concept of race to be "utterly erroneous and meaningless." He declared that early naturalists like Linnaeus and Buffon first tried to squeeze mankind into races according to complexion and other superficial traits, but anthropologists must now open their minds to the later discovery of genetic laws: Then the many differences among human groups will appear only as mutations within a single species. "Race" might perhaps have been redefined, he conceded, but Nazis and others have abused the term until it can only be chucked out for good. Snorted the Smithsonian Institution's famed Ales Hrdlicka: "If all the anthropologists agreed with Montagu and dropped the word race from their vocabulary today, he would be back tomorrow with a claim that it was a good word and try to get it reinstated."

> On another point Ashley-Montagu and Hrdlicka presented divergent evidence to reach an important agreement: Hrdlicka declared the evidence from old bones and pots is now conclusive that the long-disputed theory that the American Indians came from Asia via Bering Strait is indeed correct. Ashley-Montagu added evidence of a new sort: analysis of blood types.

Comparing blood types of American aborigines 1) with each other, 2) with contemporary and theoretical ancient Asiatics, he decided that Tierra del Fuegians came from Asia earliest, Eskimos last, that all the Indians in the Americas can roughly be dated by their distribution from south to north, that is, by their distance from Bering Strait, where they crossed.

* For two important medical discoveries reported at the meeting, see p. 75.

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