January, 1926
INDUSTRIAL A-VD Eh'GIAVEERING CHEMISTRY
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AMERICAN CONTEMPORARIES Frederick Belding Power I T H I N the limits of their profession, three principal types of service are open t o chemists. One is the advancement of knowledge through original research ; another is the advancement of man's control over his environment through development of industry; the third is the training of others for the advancement of knowledge and industry. h-ot many chemists achieve noteworthy results in more than one of these fields. Few perform real services in all three. To this latter group belongs Frederick Belding Power. To every student a t all familiar with t h a t vast horde of substances occurring in plants, Dr. Power is known for his many fundamental contributions to our knowledge of the constituents of drug plants and t o our understanding of the structure of these important substances. To the manufacturer of pharmaceutical and kindred chemicals, Dr. Power is known for his work as scientific director of the firm of Fritsche Brothers of New York and for connection with the Wellcome Chemical Research Laboratories in London. To those who are familiar with the active workers in plant chemistry, Dr. Power is known as the teacher of investigators of the first rank. As organizer and head of the School of Pharmacy of the University of Wisconsin, and as director of the Wellcome Chemical Research Laboratories, he counts among his students and associates such distinguished names as Dale, Henry, Kremers, and Tutin. Dr. Power was born in Hudson, N. Y., in 1863; graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy in 1874; received the Ph.D. degree from Strassburg in 1880, in which year he returned to take charge of the chemical laboratory of his Alma Mater. In t h o s e d a y s t h e faculty a t Strassburg included such men as Fliickiger in pharm a c o g n o s y , Baeyer in chemistry, Du Bary in botany, and Schmiedeberg in pharmacology. I n 1883 Dr. Power was called to the University of Wisconsin t o o r g a n i z e and direct the School of Pharmacy. I n 1892 he became scientific director for the new p l a n t of F r i t s c h e Brothers near New York. I n 1896 he organized and became director of the Wellcome Chemical Research Laboratories, est a b l i s h e d in London by his classmate, Henry S.Wellcome. I n 1914 he retired to return to the United States. However, a t a n age when most men are content to rest, retirement from research proved impossible for Dr. Power. At sixty-two he made a fresh start as chemist in charge of the Phytochemical Laboratory in the Bureau of Chemistry a t Washington. It is characteristic of the man that, though in Frederick
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London he had directed a large staff of research men, he was ready to go to work with limited assistance in the Bureau of Chemistry, and to do again with his own hands experimentation that in London he had been accustomed t o have done for him. In 1Vashington he has turned out as important work as a t any time in his long career. There he has for the first time given the world knowledge concerning the chemical nature of the substances to which the odors and flavors of fruits are due. He was a member of the Committee of Revision of the United States Pharmacopeia of 1890, and first vice president of the Pharmacopeia1 Convention of 1920, and has had great influence both in America and Great Britain in raising the standards of our Pharrnacopeias. For more than fifty years Dr. Power has been disentangling those complex mixtures which are plants, and separating from them well-defined substances. Only those who have themselves cultivated this field know how difficult, how time-consuming, how patience-taxing is such work. Dr. Power has also elucidated the chemical constitution of many of the substances that he has isolated. Especially noteworthy are his contributions t o the chemistry of .the volatile oils. His work upon the constituents of chaulmoogra seeds and upon the constitution of chaulmoogric acid laid the foundation upon which the present-day treatment of leprosy rests. After fifty years his thirst for knowledge remains unslacked, a n inspiration t o his associates. It was not my privilege to know Dr. Power until after his r e t u r n f r o m London. From that time until the summer of 1921, I was closely associated with him. I came to appreciate his encyclopedic knowledge; his mastery of the technic of the organic chemist; his unerring instinct for the conditions under which a reaction or a process could be made to go-no doubt, the subconscious manifestation of a v a s t e x p e r i e n c e ; h i s thoroughness and conscientiousness which made him incapable of presenting anything but sound work, matured and finished both in subject matter and in form. I observed his unfailing kindness and courtesy to all the research workers of the Bureau of Chemistry who sought his advice. He soon became one of the strongest influences in the bureau for fostering, that sound scholarship and research s p i r i t w h i c h , under pressure for immediate and practical results, so easily perishes in industrial and research organizations, and such a n influence he remains today. CARL L. ALSBERC B. F%wer
