Industrial Research 



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active part of bioohoniical activity over tlic past several 

 years as have biochemical studies of bacterial nitrof^cn 

 fixation, a process the understanding and abetting of 

 which is so vitally imjiortant to the large-scale restora- 

 tion of depleted soils through crop-rotation methods. 

 Biochemical investigations of insecticides and fungi- 

 cides are of great commercial and economic value, and 

 are being undertaken in the laboratories of several of 

 the larger chemical companies. An especially interest- 

 ing and important modern feature of this investigation 

 has been the development of substances toxic to inverte- 

 brate life, and therefore excellent insecticides or fungi- 

 cides, and yet nontoxic to warm-blooded animals. 

 Such insecticides may be spraj^ed upon crop plants 

 until their maturity, and no labor is necessary in 

 removing traces of the chemicals before processing. 

 Many of these substances are themselves vegetable 

 alkaloids, which were originally detected, extracted, 

 and concentrated by biological means. 



The production of solvents and other commodities of 

 direct industrial utility by biological means is usually 

 a process primarily involving bacteriological techniques, 

 and therefore peculiarly well served by biochemistiy 

 at every step of the way. The most important of 

 such commodities, of course, is alcohol, but others are 

 continually coming to the fore. 



The leather industry is one which is today consider- 

 ably served by biochemical techniques. The processes 

 of tanning have always been recognized as primarily 

 biochemical, but it is only within comparatively recent 

 years that efTort has been made on a really serious 

 scale to understand the methods involved or to improve 

 them. Though one of the most ancient of arts, tanning 

 until very recent years has been an almost entirely 

 empirical process. The recent contributions of bio- 

 chemistry, however, have been considerable. Con- 

 trolled tanning through the quantitative use of enzymes 

 is being studied extensively. The nature of the 

 chemical changes which are undergone by leather in 

 the course of the process are being thoroughly investi- 

 gated, and many modifications have been introduced 

 into the final product. The leather industry is one 

 which, at the moment, does not face direct serious 

 competition from any synthetic product of like proper- 

 ties, but, for very many purposes, it must resist the 

 encroachments of artificial substitutes equally or nearly 

 equally good. The flexible and semiflexible resins and 

 modified rubber or rubber-containing products will 

 serve many of the uses of leather. There are, however, 

 still enough large-scale applications remaming in in- 

 dustry for which leather is uniquely suitable to justify 

 very much further work on the biochemistry of the 

 product and its preparation. 



The leather industry has rather recently posed some 

 extremely interesting problems in the biochemical 



field of bacterial disinfection. Many liides which are 

 sent to tanneries, especially from the East, have been 

 stripped from animals which have perished from 

 anthrax, and the danger of the communication of the 

 disease to tannery workers is very serious indeed. 

 The problem of sterilizing such hides is an extremely 

 important and difficult one. Heat sterDization is out 

 of the question, as are most chemical treatments, 

 because of the irreparable damage which they do to the 

 quality of the hides. Much interesting work has been 

 done with gaseous disinfectants, but the combined 

 necessity of high toxicity, liigh penetrating power, and 

 low injuriousness to the hides, the chemical composition 

 of wliich rather closely approaches that of the organisms 

 that are to be eradicated, makes of this one of the most 

 interesting and industrially important of modern bio- 

 chemical problems. 



Though biochemistry is chronologically one of the 

 older of the border-line fields, its industrial applica- 

 tions are very far from having reached a level of satu- 

 ration. Opportunities too numerous to list individually 

 are continually presented to biochemistry in the service 

 of industry. The biochemistry of plant alkaloids is 

 still in its relative infancy, both on the purely investi- 

 gative and on the applicational sides. The chemistry 

 of immunization reactions in the human body is of 

 the highest importance for the preparation of suitable 

 vaccmes and toxin-antitoxins. The biochemistry of 

 cancer is of course very little understood today, despite 

 recent investigations into the rate and character of the 

 metabolism of cancer cells and the various aberrant 

 features of their metabolic mechanism. No problem 

 could be a more important one for biochemistry, both 

 from the standpoint of pure medicine and that of 

 industrial disease. 



There are very many plant products and byproducts 

 which present most important economic implications 

 for the future. The solution of the problems concerned 

 in their extraction and their suitable marketing will be 

 the task of biochemistry. New drying oils are needed 

 for the paint and varnish industry. Tlie range of 

 plants that may directly supply these oils has been 

 fairly well investigated for this hemisphere. The 

 investigation has only been begun, however, among 

 plants in the southern hemisphere, especially in the 

 New World, and the most important things may remain 

 to be discovered. It will be the task of the biochemist 

 to devise the methods of assay which the botanist wiU 

 apply in his search, to perfect methods of extraction 

 and analysis of the oil. Even more important than this, 

 however, because of the much wider field which it opens, 

 is the biochemist's investigation of the natural drying 

 oils known at present, with the view of artificially 

 altering their structure and so introducing properties 

 as new and as valuable as those of an entirely new 



