no Master Minds of Modern Science 



died as the result of absorbing poisons from adulterated 

 food. 



The eight people who ate wild-duck paste sandwiches 

 at Loch Maree in 1922 all died of a kind of paralysis 

 which began in their eyes and spread until they were 

 unable to breathe. The poison in this case came from a 

 bacillus called botulinus. This, says Mr Haldane, is the 

 most poisonous of all known substances which can be 

 taken by the mouth — so deadly that one man could carry 

 enough of it to poison the entire human race. This poison 

 is made by a bacillus which can only live where there is 

 no oxygen, and is therefore found chiefly in tinned foods, 

 but occasionally in the interior of sausages and hams. 

 Happily it is killed by cooking. 



It was Professor Bruce- White of Bristol University who 

 solved the riddle of the death of these unfortunate people 

 by detecting the poison. While every large town in Britain 

 has its own analyst who examines suspected foods, the 

 more difficult analyses are largely in the hands of half a 

 dozen men at the Bristol Laboratory. They are inun- 

 dated with samples of cheese, ham, brawn, meat pastes, 

 tinned salmon, and other foods that are under suspicion. 

 In some cases these chemists do not hesitate to taste the 

 suspected samples, and on one occasion Professor Bruce- 

 White made himself very ill by tasting some Canadian 

 cheese which had caused poisoning outbreaks at Dover 

 and at Warrington. 



The list of men and women who have risked their lives 

 for Science — and often lost them — is a very long one. 

 One of the most famous was the late Professor Maxwell 

 Lefroy, whose principal triumph was the defeat of the 

 death-watch beetle, which does so much harm to old 

 buildings. It was during a search for a new form of 

 poison gas to destroy the house-fly that he was killed. 

 That was in 1925. Earlier in the same year he had been 

 very nearly killed. When he recovered he was asked what 



