Evening star., 1939-04-09

There assembled in Baltimore last
week a congress Of brains in shirt sleeves
That is an impressionistic picture of
1000 members of the American Chemical
Society-men who earn their nvings by
the sweat of their minds. They are the
brickmakers, bricklayers and pick-and-
shovel workers on the foundations of to-
morrow. A convention of the American
Chemical Society is a rather different
affair from a gathering of any other
professional group. The men themselves
are different in the almost complete alb
sence of stuffed -shirtedness. They are
daily who lift heavy loads. live on intel
lectual corned beef and cabbage and do
not wear boards to look learned. They
are not the architects, the bosses or the
salesmen. They are the builders, the
workers in things and not the spinners
Of words.
Learn of Life-and Death.
They are the builders of tomorrow
in which men will live longer because
these laborers with retorts and test tubes
have dug so far into the fundamental
processes of life. They are also, perhaps,
building tomorrow in which men will
die faster and more horribly, because the
secrets of death as we'll as life are buried
In the soil of knowledge they are exca-
waiting. In days past they discovered
disease germs and they compounded gun
powder. Today they are getting close
to the flterable viruses and compounding
new and more destructive explosives.
They are, above all Others the makers
Of new industries which will provide pay
rolls for generations unborn, the creators
Of easier and more comfortable living,
abundance.
At Baltimore, from scores of industrial
and college laboratories, were reported
outstanding discoveries. Few meetings
in our time have produced announce
nents of so many advances which are
bound to affect the daily lives of all men,
All creation, so far as is known, is
made up Of 90 fundamental building
blocks-the elements. In various COM
binations these" constitute everything
that is-the mud in the street, the feet
that walk in the mud. the brain that di-
rects the feet. It is all matter of how
they are put together. Nature worked
in subtle and intricate ways. The job
of the chemist has been, almost up to
the present, to find out how she worked,
the elements she used and the combi-
nations in which she arranged them
This was excavating for the future. The
chemists demolished Natures buildings
to find out what kind of bricks were in
her walls, how the bricklayer had placed
them and what sort of cement had been
used. Then 1t was possible, in many
cases, to put the same sorts of bricks,
perhaps obtained from sources far re-
moved, together again in the same sorts
of combinations.
Struggle to Duplicate Nature.
This was the chemistry of the recent
past. Out of Jumps Of coal chemists took
the bricks with which they duplicated
the odor of the violet and the colors
| of the rose. Slavishly they copied Ma
lures own architecture of things. They
were inhibited by the overwhelming ira
dition that man could not excel Nature,
although unconsciously he had been
doing it from the beginning. This phase
of chemistry is still in progress. In
fact, 1t may have just about attained
its heydey. Take such case, reported
In Baltimore, as the making of vanilla
out Of hemlocks- is, getting out of
hemlocks the proper elements and rear
| ranging them into the substance which
carries the particular flavor of the vanilla
bean. Or making wool out of milk
in the beginning Nature made them
out of about the same things, differently
arranged. The chemist demolishes the
structure Of one constituent of the milk
and rebuilds them into wool.
But the more advanced chemists are
beginning to look upon all this as anti
| quated Making wool out of milk or
| dynamite out of gas and steam, or but
tons out of air and water are significant
only as steps toward another end
making something better than wool or
dynamite. For the first time the chem
ist has the tools in his hands which will
enable him to make something better
than wool which will serve the same pur.
pose. He no longer wants to make rub
Der, but substances which will have none