The Sun Chemist by Lionel Davidson Read Free Book Online Page B

fermentation.’
    He inclined the jar toward me and took the top off. Rather a pleasing and wholesome fragrance came out of the jar, not immediately placeable but strangely familiar, all the same. It didn’t smell at all of potatoes. I looked more closely at the absolutely anonymous liquid. Was this the secret stuff of life? He had been talking rather a lot about life forms.
    ‘Does fusel oil smell like this?’ I said.
    Dr Finster placed his own nose over the jar. It was a powerful and useful-looking organ, and the end of it quivered delicately as he made his observation.
    ‘Yes. Very like. By no means unlike fusel oil. However, it is not fusel oil.’
    ‘No.’ I could imagine Winogradsky’s nostrils fluting excitedly over it seventy years ago, and Weizmann’s, more critically and subtly, a few years later. ‘What happens to it now?’ I said.
    ‘What happens to it is whatever one wants to happen. It is a very basic substance,’ Dr Finster said wearily. ‘I will explain again.’
    I listened with more determination this time.
    Organic chemistry was the chemistry of living or once-living forms. It was largely the chemistry of carbon. The carbon came in some way from the sun, and growing vegetable matter synthesized it into starch, sugar, and other substances. Animals ate the vegetables, and people ate animals, together with vegetables. But whether they were eating it or wearing it, making furniture out of it or burning it, they were utilizing the energy originally supplied by the sun, and thus participating in the carbon cycle.
    Vegetable matter that had in some way got out of the cycle by escaping contemporary use had become fossilized. It was recoverable in the form of coal, shale, peat, oil, and so on, and the solar energy in it was also recoverable, by scientific means. The simplest scientific means, as in the case of coal, was to put a match to it; it would then release, in the form of heat and light, some part of the original far more lavish solar contribution. This was a crude means of conversion, and Dr Finster said so.
    ‘However, if we are to regard this as fuel,’ he said, giving the jar a little shake, ‘all we have done is to accelerate the naturalprocess. We have taken vegetable material and allowed certain bacteria to break it down into alcohols and other substances. This certainly is what nature has done to make oil. But in nature it has occurred over millions of years, while here we have done it in hours.’
    ‘And this is what Weizmann has done?’ I said, falling easily into his preferred perfect tense.
    ‘Yes. He has done it with maize. He isolated certain bacteria – in fact, certain Clostridia – that he observed with the maize. And he has set them to work, by making a fermentation, to digest the starch in the maize.’
    ‘I thought he got acetone out of it.’
    ‘Here also we have acetone, and other substances.’
    ‘And what has Vava done?’
    ‘He has worked with Ipomoea batatas ,’
    ‘I see,’ I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Dr. Finster looked at me. He looked as if he would like to help, but didn’t know how.
    ‘As between Vava’s batatas and Weizmann’s maize,’ I said, ‘is there much difference, Doctor Finster?’
    ‘With the result? There are differences. I have not found the great differences that Vava has told him.’
    ‘How do we know what Vava told him?’
    ‘Ah!’ Dr Finster went to a box file, lying on its side. There was an open lab book inside, with a ball-point pen in it. He removed this and took out a paper lying underneath. It was a photostat, which I remembered as soon as I saw it, of the letter to Fritz Haber that I had sent Connie months ago. There was only page 2 of the letter. Haber had been having difficulty settling his affairs in Germany. The government had imposed a levy on all Jews leaving the country. He had earlier pointed out to Weizmann that scientists who had gone to Turkey had been released from payment of this levy