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National Resources Planning Board 



together, the bore of the tube being controlled and 

 uniform, so that the "pore size" of the filter is predeter- 

 mined. Techniques of pressure and vacuum filtration 

 have been developed to a high degree in the biological 

 industries. The application of supersonics to suspen- 

 sions has been widely used in the biological industries as 

 a means of promoting reactions, of settling suspensions, 

 of breaking or forming emulsions, and, occasionally for 

 the disinfection of such liquids as milk, since it has been 

 shown that under certain conditions cavitation may be 

 fatal to bacteria. 



High-speed photography is of very considerable 

 importance to a number of biological industries in the 

 analysis of various unit operations in their processes 

 and in the study of the fundamental physical properties 

 of some of the substances they handle. As such, the 

 method is used more nearly as an analytical than a 

 routine tool. 



There are a number of other physical tools which 

 find wide, if scattered or occasional, use in the biological 

 industries in special applications of analysis or process 

 work. Such, for example, is the absorption electron 

 microscope, for which uses are only begirming to be 

 found, and the applications of which will probably 

 widen rapidly in the coming years. Such too are the 

 various designs of Geiger counter, the principal bio- 

 logical uses of which have centered about the appli- 

 cation of tracer elements to the analysis of biological 

 processes, already considered. Electrocautery instru- 

 ments, and the fever-therapy equipment previously 

 described find principal^ medical applications, although 

 the latter may be of some use in the foods mdustries. 

 And finally, electric soil-cable heating has important 

 agricultural applications. 



These are but a few of the many miscellaneous ways 

 in which physics and biophysics serve industry. They 

 have been selected almost at random, to give a sampling 

 of the extent of that vast but new and very rapidly 

 growing field in which the biophysicist of the future 

 cannot but be of the very greatest industrial service. 



Biophysics has been recognized as a science so very 

 recently that adequate academic facilities for training 

 in the field are still woefully lacking. The adequately 

 equipped biophysicist must first of all be possessed of a 

 sound working Icnowledge of experimental physics, and 

 must have the "feel" for the handling and the applica- 

 tion of physical tools. Adequate educational facilities 

 for this side of his training are available in abundance 

 in the ordinary good undergraduate and graduate 

 courses in experimental physics in most of the uni- 

 versities of the country. Much more important even 

 than this, however, the biophysicist must have an 

 extremely good and comprehensive knowledge of 

 biology. If he is in academic or theoretical work, he 

 must be competent to choose for his experimental 



material biological organisms which will be pre- 

 eminently suited to his needs. Superficially similar 

 organisms differ so widely in this regard that a good 

 choice of material may be one of the most important 

 steps in assuring the success of an undertaking. In 

 industry it is predominantly important that the bio- 

 physicist be widely familiar with the range of biological 

 materials with which he will be required to deal, m 

 order that his design and use of physical equipment 

 shall be adapted in the best possible manner to the 

 work in hand. 



The educational facilities for posts of this sort, either 

 in industrial work or in academic fields, are pitifully 

 meager in this country. A very few universities have 

 set up biophysical departments, and are attempting to 

 design courses to meet a growing need, but in most 

 cases students are obliged to select courses in two very 

 different fields considerably at random, with no mature 

 coordinator to help them solve a very difficult problem. 

 The difficulty is increased for the student by the fact 

 that it is only very recently that the two subjects have 

 been related even in academic minds, so that he is 

 virtually obliged, first of all, to discover for himself 

 the intimate relations between the fields, and then to 

 unearth courses which will make the details of these 

 relationships clear to him — all at a period of extreme 

 youth and with a very limited experience and per- 

 spective. This is an extremely difficult task but one 

 whose successful solution is of very great future moment 

 to a large division of industrial research. The designing 

 and execution of courses in biophysics and the delinea- 

 tion of the work of the biophysicist as a recognized 

 profession is one of the most important tasks facing 

 the universities and industry in the immediate future. 



Geology — Geochemistry — Geophysics 



Geology, geochemistry, and geophysics are so very 

 closely linked in both scientific and industrial practice, 

 and particularly in the latter, that it has seemed best to 

 treat their activities, and the work of the men in them 

 who serve industry, as a single unit. 



Geology is in its very essence a border-line discipline, 

 both in its academic characteristics and in its industrial 

 applications. From its very inception geology has 

 been a composite science, consisting essentially of 

 special applications of physics, chemistry, and biology. 

 In undertaking to describe, and, insofar as possible, to 

 explain the features of our nonliving environment it 

 has had to include within itself, by definition, a very 

 large range of subjects and fragments of subjects. This 

 fact is reflected in the number of subsciences into 

 which the discipline has been divided. Cosmic geology, 

 geognosy, petrology, lithology, dynamical geology, 

 structural geology, physiography, paleontology, stratig- 

 raphy, economic geology, mining geology, glaciology. 



