SELECTED PAPERS 



been expressed in connexion with the problem of the world's energy 

 provision. Nevertheless, there is always the bright prospect that be- 

 fore a state of emergency will have arisen, human cunning will have 

 succeeded in fixing solar energy directly, i.e., without the aid of the 

 plant world, in a form that is useful to society. Even the possibility 

 that some day man will be in a position to exploit the enormous intra- 

 atomic energy cannot any longer be relegated merely to the realm of 

 fiction, as indicated by scientists of the stature of Richardson and 

 Rutherford. 



But the exhaustion of fossil fuels is important not only from the 

 point of view of energetics. I have already mentioned that they supply 

 a significant fraction of the raw materials needed by the organic- 

 chemical industry. The gradual depletion and the resulting higher 

 price of the fossil raw materials will consequently entail that the chem- 

 ical industry will gravitate more and more towards procuring its start- 

 ing materials immediately from the present-day plant world.* 



Thus the intensification of agriculture, and its development along 

 lines of modern industry, will in the future become more and more the 

 order of the day. This will mean that the chemical industry will be 

 provided primarily with a few staple agricultural products whose 

 value derives largely from their content of the three major groups of 

 substances, the carbohydrates, oils, and proteins. And then it are par- 

 ticularly the carbohydrates - the sugars, starches, and cell-wall constitu- 

 ents - that will become prominent as raw materials. 



Now the specific advantages of microbiological mechanisms are 

 strikingly apparent in the transformations of carbohydrates into 

 numerous other products. With an ease that elicits the organic chem- 

 ist's envy various microbes can split the glucose molecule, each one 

 yielding its own more or less specific products. Thus the common 

 yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, furnishes alcohol and carbon dioxide; 

 Lactobacillus fermentum and related types produce significant quantities 

 of lactic acid ; Fernbach's Bacillus macerans manufactures butanol and 



* The fact that we can currently observe diversions in the opposite direction, for 

 example in the manufacture of alcohol from coal via calcium carbide, acetylene, and 

 acetaldehyde, or in the production of synthetic fats from paraffins by way of their 

 oxidation to fatty acids, does not detract from the validity of the general argument. 

 By increasing the utilization of the fossil raw materials such developments can only 

 hasten their depletion. 



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