A WORLD OF CHANGE — WEIDLEHsT 197 



It is significant that developments in increasing the utilization of 

 cotton have in the past been made almost altogether without any- 

 concerted action or conscious direction on the part of the cotton 

 industry. This situation encourages one to believe that systematic, 

 cooperative effort on the part of growers, manufacturers, and various 

 research organizations, in developing new uses for cotton and in ex- 

 panding present uses, should be much more effective in stimulating 

 increased demand than haphazard, individual effort. 



Sugar is another product that is vital in our national economic and 

 social system. Sugar occupies an important place in the normal diet 

 of all the people. It likewise is one of the cheapest, purest raw ma- 

 terials available upon which to base a new chemical industry. This 

 new industry is now in the process of evolution, and today chemicals 

 made from sugar are entering into our industrial processes to produce 

 new and better products. 



The scientists are doing the fundamental work. Industry is pion- 

 eering the commercialization of these new products, and eventually 

 the agriculturist will have to supply the raw material because of the 

 new demand created. So one often may know where a research be- 

 gins, but rarely where it will end. 



All this requires knowledge, will, and action. The knowledge 

 which will find these new uses is a product of research. It will come 

 out of the laboratory where the chemist is breaking down the raw 

 materials we call cotton, sweetpotatoes, and corn into cellulose and 

 starch and these again into the tiny atoms of which they are consti- 

 tuted. It is these atoms that are the chemist's raw materials. He 

 may buy them in the form of cotton or soybeans or milk, but he sells 

 them in the form of rayon, automobile parts, organic acids, new glues 

 and gums aod dextrins, new building materials for our homes, new 

 paints and varnishes. These new uses require as raw materials the 

 molecular aggregates which we take off the land in annual crops. It 

 is true that the chemist can synthesize them in his laboratory, and 

 some of them he will undoubtedly produce there, but this year and 

 for many years to come the sunshine and the rain, the fertility of our 

 soils, and the patient labor of our farmers will grow the crops industry 

 needs more cheaply than the chemist can make them. 



The better living conditions secured through the increased wealth 

 provided by science, together with the application of science to hygiene 

 and medicine, have considerably increased the average expectancy of 

 life. This great achievement in public health is sufficient to justify 

 the belief that those who call our industrial civilization mean in 

 quality have narrow views and scant idealism. 



Chemistry and medicine are establishing a more cooperative pro- 

 gram of research, and a good example is some work that has been 

 under way since 1926 on the treatment of pneumonia. 



