378 ANlSrUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1961 



as a primary tool. The outlook in protein chemistry, which 15 years 

 ago was still rather bleak, is now full of promise and offers new 

 vistas in biology and medicine. Equally spectacular have been de- 

 velopments in the nucleic-acid field. Since the establislmient of 

 the general structure of the nucleic acids by chemical means 10 years 

 ago and the consequent establishment of the physical nature of the 

 deoxyribonucleic acids which form the genie material in living cells, 

 there has been an astonishing flowering of chemical and biological 

 work in this field. Occupying as they do a central position in the 

 cellular economy by controlling the transmission of hereditary char- 

 acteristics and by guiding the synthesis of cellular proteins, the 

 nucleic acids form a group of compounds whose importance in life 

 processes can hardly be overestimated. They are also key constitu- 

 ents of viruses, and the relevance of their study to research on cancer 

 is being increasingly recognized. Much remains to be done chemi- 

 cally, before anything approaching a full understanding of the 

 structure and function of individual nucleic acids will be realized, 

 but the increasing attention being paid to them certainly holds out 

 considerable hope for the future. 



The production of synthetic macromolecular materials — plastics, 

 ' synethetic fibers, resins, and rubbers — is one of the fastest growing 

 sectors of organic chemical industry. It had its beginnings in the 

 production of synthetic resins like bakelite and in the efforts made, 

 notably in Germany, to produce satisfactory substitutes for natural 

 rubber by polymerizmg butadiene and other conjugated dienes, and 

 it has since undergone enormous development. The reason for this 

 development is easily understood, since by applying polymerization 

 or polycondensation methods to a variety of small organic molecules 

 one can obtain materials analogously constituted to the great classes 

 of natural macromolecules and so produce fibers, elastomers, and plas- 

 tic materials which may in many cases be more suited to a particular 

 use than naturally occurring materials (cf., for example, nylon, wool, 

 and silk). In this field the most striking recent advances have been 

 perhaps in the field of olefine polymerization (notably, ethylene and 

 propylene) at low pressures with organometallic catalysts, and the 

 production of isotactic polymers in which the monomer units are 

 arranged in a stereochemically regular manner. This regularity, 

 which is always found in the natural macromolecules, opens the way 

 to synthetic polymers with properties markedly different from the 

 randomly arranged polymers produced by older processes. 



POINTERS TO FUTURE 



In these various fields there are visible a number of trends which, 

 I believe, point to likely directions of future research and industrial 



