Sugar!
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- Sugar!
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1965
- Rights
-
- Abstract
- Sugar is not only for coffee and cakes but also for industrial uses.
- Fulltext
- ■ Sugar is not only for coffee and cakes but also for industrial uses. SUGAR! You’re old-fashioned if you use sugar only to sweeten your coffee and grapefruit. Try varnishing your old porch chairs with sugar. Su gar makes an excellent var nish. Can you turn sugar into gasoline? Do you smoke sugar in your cigarettes? Can you make rubber heels out of sugar? All this - and much more is being done with this everyday flavoring. The sugar varnish is a new product called allyl su crose. Two chemists at the Eastern Regional Research Laboratory of the U.S. De partment of Agriculture, P. L. Nichols, Jr., and E. Yanovsky, succeeded in prepar ing allyl sucrose after long research. Allyl sucrose is a heavy, light yellow liquid which hardens into an insoluble transparent resin when ex posed to air and heated. It makes a splendid finish for floors, wall coverings, fur niture and woodwork. It is extremely hard, shatter proof on impact, very glossy — yet flexible enough to be useful where a stiff plastic would crack. For good measure, it resist water, heat, acids, grease and alcohol. Allyl sucrose is so tough that when welders’ goggles are coated with it, the gog gles last 400 hours or 100 times as long as ordinary welders' goggles. If your cigarette is a sweet smoke, the reason is simple. Between 10 to 25 percent of the dry weight of the pop ular mild cigarette is native or added sugar. In 1948, tobacco manufacturers used 26 million pounds of refined cane and beet sugar. Here’s why. The burning tip of your cigarette is alkaline. A sugarless cigarette would give a bitter smoke. The ciga rette sugar breaks down into organic acids that neutralize the ammonia and alkalies re September 1965 47 leased by burning and so give a mild smoke. Among other things, sugar is a medicine. Sleepingsickness symptoms such as convulsions and delirium have been relieved by ad ministering intravenous in jections of glucose. In di seases of the liver a high sugar diet is a standard treat ment since sugar prevents damage to the liver by con verting certain poisonous substances into harmless ones. High sugar diets also save the liver some of the labor of converting other foods to glycogen. Sugar is useful in gastric ulcer cases for it quiets the hun ger contractions of the sto mach almost immediately after it is taken. Since vio lent stomach contractions are oft£n agonizing to the pa tient, sugar actually relieves pain. The same sugar that serves as food and medicine may some day yield an inexhaus tible ocean of gasoline. The Carnegie Institute of Tech nology has stated that by imitating nature in the labo ratory we shall be able to obtain a perpetual supply of gasoline and coal from the sugars and starches of plants. Sugar cane and sugar beet would then replace coal mines and oil wells. 'One hundred tons of dry sugar cane will, if suitably processed, yield 2,980 gallons of gasoline, 3,430 gallons of medium grade oil and 1,210 gallons of lubricating oil be sides 8.45 long tons of raw sugar. And there’s plenty of raw material. In 1946, the plant waste in the Unit ed States ran to 260 million tons, which was enough to supply every car and truck in the country with gasoline for a year. Which points up one fact that has deeply impressed industrial chemists — sugar is far and away the most abundant of the pure organic chemicals. About 14 billion pounds of sugar are produc ed every year in the United States. For comparison’s sake, in 1947 about 850 mil lion pounds of plastics were manufactured. Moreover, over 250,000 derivatives of sugar are possible. Consi dering the extreme cheapness of sugar as a raw material, it is no wonder that in the last 20 years many industrial and government laboratories 48 Panorama have been intensively inves tigating the industrial possi bilities of common table su gar. Since 1929 more than 200 patents have been taken out on the conversion of sugar and its derivatives into plas tics and other products. Most of these substances are still in the laboratory stage but some are being manu factured and many more are on the way. Lactic acid, produced in sugar refining, is the base of alkyd resins which are made into auto mobile finishes. The "paint” on your car is an alkyd re sin. From lactic acid the chem ists of the Eastern Regional Research Laboratory have prepared a new synthetic rubber named "lactoprene.” Gaskets, .rubber heels, bottle stoppers, rubber cement and hundreds of other goods can be made from lactoprene. Lactoprene will take its place as one of the synthetic rub bers that will free the United States from dependence on the rubber of war-threatened Malaya. The conversion of sugar into substitutes for proteins like meat has actually been achieved. British scientists are keenly interested in this sort of research, for the Bri tish West Indies combine surplus sugar crops with tre mendous o v e rpopulation. Barbados, for example, has 996 people per square mile. The British are making excellent progress, not through intricate chemical manipulations, but by bio logical means. Sugar is used as a medium for grow ing yeasts related to the common brewer’s yeast. This yeast, Torula utilis, multi ples 64 times in 9 hours. In other words, a single yeast cell will divide into about one billion new yeast cells in 10 hours! At the experimental pilot plant in Jamaica, supported by the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Re search, nitrogen is added to a solution of molasses. M.olasses, as everyone knows, is a by-product of the extrac tion of sugar from sugar cane. The yeast converts the molasses into a food contain ing about 50 percent pro tein which is rich in vita min B. This food is a cream-colored powder with a meaty flavor that can be September 1965 49 used in bread, soups and vegetable dishes. Six ounces will supply the average man with his daily requirements for protein and the B-vitamins. Plants turning out more than 500 pounds per day of the new yeast food are now in operation in the British West Indies, and other plants are being built in Porto Rico, South America and South Africa. Estimates in dicate that the new food will cost less than 10 cents a pound. Taste is the main obstacle to its widespread consumption but that diffi culty will be overcome. Hundreds of species of yeast are known and, doubtless, thousands of strains can be created by X-ray mutations. We may have dozens of yeast flavors from roast beef to vanilla! Sugar-grown yeasts would then become a household staple the world over and the menace of world starvation would be ended. Transforming sugar into rubber, plastics, gasoline, var nish, meat substitutes and a host of other useful commo dities is a sample of the creative powers of modern science. — From Science Di gest. PEACE What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana en forced in the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave ... but genuine peace . . . that makes life on earth worth living—the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. — John F. Kennedy 50 PANORAMA