SELECTED PAPERS 



It is well known that the oleomargarine industry, which during the 

 war years underwent a rapid expansion especially in England, was 

 seriously threatened by the poor keeping qualities of its product. Oleo- 

 margarine appeared to be particularly vulnerable to the deterioration 

 known as rancidity. Owing to the outstanding studies of Jacobsen we 

 now know that rancidity, both of vegetable fats and, as Orla-Jensen 

 had proved, of dairy butter, is caused by micro-organisms. It will 

 therefore be necessary to attach great value to various means by 

 which the product can be protected against contamination during the 

 successive stages in its production. If we may believe a recent study 

 of Stokoe it will even be necessary to pay the closest possible attention 

 to such measures already during the production of the plant oils that 

 are used as the starting material in the oleomargarine industry. 



During the war large quantities of sugar, produced in tropical coun- 

 tries, could not immediately be shipped, and thus had to be temporar- 

 ily stored there. In this case, too, deterioration was soon observed. 

 Kopeloff and collaborators in the U.S.A., and Anions in Java, could 

 unequivocally demonstrate that the deterioration was again the result 

 of microbial activities. In some cases the source of the contamination 

 could be located in the factories, and measures could thus be devised 

 to restrict the deleterious effects to a minimum. Browne estimates that 

 these microbes caused the Cuban sugar harvest of 1916 alone to suffer a 

 loss in value of $ 1,500,000. 



Let me finally remind you of the industries concerned with the 

 preservation of foodstuffs, which owe their existence to the ubiquit- 

 ousness of spoilage-provoking microbes. Guided by intelligent pure 

 food laws, the large American canning industries have increasingly 

 been forced to adopt practices that are based on the results of scientific 

 investigations dealing with the destruction of micro-organisms as a 

 function of particular conditions. This certainly is an example worthy 

 of being emulated ! 



Whereas microbiology thus serves industry firstly by providing leads 

 for the proper management of biochemical transformations, and sec- 

 ondly by developing adequate techniques for a rational elimination 

 of unwanted micro-organisms, there is yet a third area in which it can 

 unfold its powers to the benefit of industry. In this connexion I have 

 in mind the indispensability of scientific investigations for the proper 



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