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INDUSTRIAL A N D ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
Vol. 18, N o . 11
AMERICAN CONTEMPORARIES Meyer E. Jaffa EYER E. JAFFA was recently appointed Professor Emeri- ence, enriched by his unfailing memory, he is quick to detect tus in Nutrition in the University of California. Thus is errors in statements of facts and details and perceive fallacies in marked the close of the forty-seventh year as chemist, hastily prepared conclusions. Consequently he was able to see teacher, investigator, and public official. His retirement was the gross unsoundness of the claims of the exponents of vitamin pills and tablets, which came in a deluge upon the market soon the result of an academic ruling based on age alone and does not imply that his period of active service is ended. On the con- after the discovery of these food principles. He immediately trary he is now actively engaged as director of the California staged a counter attack through the bulletin of the State Board of Health and rendered an opinion of State Food and Drug Laboratory, an inthese products which it was unnecessary stitution whose organization he was more to alter in the least a year later when or less directly responsible for in 1908. laboratory experiments carried out elseHere you may find him early any mornwhere were published. ing directing the affairs of that bureau For many years Professor Jaffa has with the energy of a man of thirty. conducted a consulting service to the Professor Jaffa possesses a remarkable people of the state. This work has been p h y s i q u e. His colleagues that have extended through c o r r e s p o n d e n c e , known him longer than I say he is just the through lectures in ruial districts, and same Jaffa today that he was twenty through personal interviews a t his office years ago. Before his retirement he was in the university. It requires a great the oldest professor in the university deal of devotion to humanity to carry from point of service, yet he uses no cane, out such a task year after year; yet and walks with a quick step that betrays Professor Jaffa tirelessly replied to every no decline. query addressed him. He willingly apIt may be said that Jaffa is the father peared before the farmers in their rural of the science of nutrition in the Unimeetings, giving them dependable facts versity of California. He became inand opinions on foods and nutrition, terested in work in that field about 1890. translated into terms they readily underHe was a t the time one of Hilgard’s stood. He became well known to the a s s i s t a n t s , and under this immortal poultry men, in the same manner, to the scientist he gained valuable experience in orchardists, to the dairy and cattle men, agricultural chemistry. Little thought and to the food-products manufacturers. was given to the study of nutrition in His opinions were readily accepted and those days as compared with the energy respected by these various classes, bedevoted to that work today. Consecause his judgments were seldom found quently, pioneering in that subject was M. E. Jaffa to be in error. difficult and incidentally met with con- . .psn One of his most remarkable charactersiderable opposition. Jaffa early saw the istics is his excellent memory. He rarely possibilities in that undeveloped field and is compelled to say he has forgotten. His started out single-handed to solicit SUPport for nutritional studies. In spite of the handicap of a poorly coordination of ideas is such that he can instantly give references to subjects chosen a t will and frequently can produce the source, equipped laboratory, he worked with unfaltering persistence and number, year, and occasionally the page. His office and study determination and was finally rewarded by the establishment of a appears to the visitor a heterogeneous mass of books, filing cabidivision of nutrition in the College of Agriculture. In 1890 the science of nutrition was in its infancy. Very little nets, and pamphlets, but when called upon to answer questions work had been done with isolated food substances. Vitamins which are sent to him because no one else knows where to find were yet unknown. Atwater was carrying out his work with an answer, he quickly finds his way through the maze and usually the human calorimeter and interest was centered around the obtains a result. I have never known him to give up the search caloric value of foods. Professor Jaffa from the very start had unrewarded. He is so familiar, today with many books and been interested in safeguarding the food supply of the people. papers written years ago that one would think he had read them He early applied himself to this phase of nutrition and had an hour before; yet years may have elapsed since he had occasion studied the problem of the adulteration of food long before the to turn to these sources. I n Professor Jaffa, students have found a teacher who was Harrison Pure Food Act of 1904. It was not surprising, then, that he was instrumental in the establishment of the California delighted to help them to the fullest extent a t any time, whether State Food and Drug Law in 1905 and that he became the first in the classroom or outside of it. He kept no office hours f o r director of the Bureau of Foods and Drugs. He has always this purpose, but was ever standing ready to serve them. Once waged war against fraudulent advertising and ill-founded claims .a student under Jaffa meant acquaintance for a lifetime. Each name and face, together with some incident connected with t h e for superior nutritive properties of food products. The poultry men of the state owe a great deal to Professor Jaffa for his fight student’s attendance, is catalogued in his memory. Some times against those fraudulent milk by-products manufacturers who they return after ten or twenty years’ absence and are astonished would have sold them for their baby chicks diluted products to learn that they are remembered and identified with a certain year. preserved with sulfuric acid. It always seemed a pleasure to Professor Jaffa to bring in his H e possesses a keen perspective. Because of his vast experi-
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INDUSTRI.4L A N D ENGINEERING CHEMISTRY
November, 1926
assistants t o meet whomsoever of note came to his office. Young men usually have little opportunity t o meet prominent men. I recall with much pleasure having been called into his office, when 1 had been his assistant but a short time, to meet Harvey W. Wiley. Jaffa was one of the charter members of the Faculty Club on the campus. He still takes an active part in the club. At noontime almost any day you may find him in the billiard room with a group of younger men engaged in a game. At home you will find Jaffa always cheerful and happy. No matter what difficulties and disappointments he has experienced during the day, he drops these behind when he leaves the campus.
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Adversities do not seem to upset him. He has a remarkable way of seeing the bright side of life. During the fire in the fall of 1923, which wiped out in a few hours so many blocks of Berkeley’s fine homes, Professor Jaffa lost his home and all but a few of his personal effects. His home was the last of eleven hundred to burn. I came upon him in his office in the evening after the fire and found him nervously playing with a pencil. He looked more tired than usual but otherwise appeared just the same as ever. He said “It feels mighty queer not to have any place to go home to, tonight-well, anyway Mrs. Jaffa won’t have to climb the hill any more.” HAROLD Goss
Poisoning b y Mercury Vapor’ By L. M. Dennis CORNELLUNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y.
I
T IS probable that most of those who work with mercury
do not realize the menace t o which they are exposed through possible poisoning by the vapor of the metal, and they are also probably not aware of the insidious manner in which the vapor, entering the system through the lungs, will gradually cause most serious toxic effects. Perhaps several of our fellow-scientists have developed, in less or greater severity, the symptoms of mercury poisoning, and it is with the thought of enabling them to recognize the cause of their ailment, and of calling the attention of American chemists and physicists generally to the gravity of this danger, that this summary of a recent article2 by Prof. Alfred Stock, of Berlin, is presented. For the past twenty-five years Professor Stock has been working almost constantly with apparatus containing mercurypumps, manometers, valves, troughs, etc. Early in that period he began to suffer both mental and bodily distress, for which the eminent physicians whom he consulted could find neither cause nor remedy. The most marked symptoms were intermittent headaches, a t first slight and gradually increasing in severity, nervousness, catarrh, frequent sore-throat, weakening of the senses of smell and hearing, acid taste in the mouth, inflammation of the eyes, sore spots on the tongue and throat, reddening of the gums and toothache. These last two symptoms, which usually appear early in mercury poisoning, appeared quite late in Professor Stock’s case because, he thinks, of the great care that he had taken of his teeth since early boyhood. Further symptoms were mental weariness, disinclination for work of any kind, sleepiness, trembling of the outstretched fingers, aching in the limbs and back, and loss of appetite. Particularly depressing was the weakening of his memory, which had formerly been unusually good. It became difficult for him to lecture without very detailed notes before him, a telephone number was forgotten in the brief interval between looking i t up in the book and putting in the call, names escaped him, even those of old acquaintances, errors were made in the simplest of mathematical calculations, and the writing of an article or even of an ordinary letter called for infinite labor. His assistants in his research laboratory suffered similarly. The cause of the trouble was not recognized until two of his co-workers, who used a small, closed room because of the nature of the investigation which they had in hand, developed a n acute, severe attack of mercury poisoning with the familiar symptoms of soreness about the teeth and ulcers on the gums, which made the cause a t once clear to the attending physician. This led to the immediate examination of the air of the laboratory, which was found to contain mercury, the amount varying in different rooms between 0.01 and 0.001 mg. per cubic meter. 1
Received July 21, 1926.
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2. angrw. Chem., S9, 461 (1926).
Air at room temperature saturated with mercury vapor contains about 12 mg. per cubic meter. A man inhales hourly about 0.5 cubic meter of air, and most of the inhaled mercury is retained in the lungs. The fact that the laboratory air contained only so small an amount of the vapor explains why the symptoms developed fully only after one or more years. To avoid possible poisoning by vapor of mercury the floor of the laboratory should be free from cracks (it should not, of course, be of wood) and if covered with linoleum or oil cloth, breaks in the covering should be a t once repaired. No spilled mercury should be allowed to lie in the room, and containers of mercury should be covered or stoppered when not in use. Ventilation should be thorough and efficient. (In a later article Stock and Heller describe a method for the detection of mercury in the air.) All work with open mercury should be carried on in a hood whenever possible. No medication thus far used appears to hasten the removal of mercury from the body. Only fresh air and time bring recovery. Professor Stock adds a warning against amalgam fillings in the teeth and gives the quantitative results of exposure of silver-amalgam, which had carefully been prepared by a dentist, to the temperature of the body for a period of some days. From 0.801 gram of such an amalgam 11.2 mg. of mercury distilled off in 23 days; from 0.810 gram of amalgam, 15.3 mg. of mercury in 12 days. He cites cases of undoubted mercury poisoning caused by such amalgam fillings. In closing, he calls attention to the sufferings of Faraday during the last third of his life, which in the light of Professor Stock’s experience seem almost certainly to have been due to poisoning by vapor of mercury. “It is tragic to think how easily his ills might have been relieved, and what further gifts to science might have been made by this great Master if the cause of his distress had been recognized and removed.”
Suit over Cracking Patents Still in Process Editor of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry: My attention has been called to a glaring inaccuracy on page 1045 of my article, “Progress of a Year-A Chemical Review,” in the October issue. The statement is there made that “during the fall of 1925 a lengthy trial of the Government’s suit against the oil companies charging illegal monopoly on the basis of the patents held on cracking processes dragged itself out through many weeks of expert testimony and recrimination from opposing witnesses.” As a matter of fact, the trial is still dragging itself out and the defense of the oil companies has just begun. The “recrimination” certainly occurred, but this was not between witnesses of the opposing sides in the controversy. D. H. KILLEFFER
