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AMONG SOME Suggestion from East Berlin May we have your attention, please, to a 411-word essay on lipase? Ostensibly it advertises an Eastman Organic Chemical, Phenyl Laurate (East man 7885). To be sure, 25 grams of this compound may actually be purchased for $3 from the address given at the bottom of the page. Because of difficulty in drap ing intellectual dignity around a bottle worth $3, it serves our purpose to issue the large, round declaration that enzymes are the most important subject on earth. Does not their interplay govern all activ ity in the biosphere, including that in the cerebra of men of business and science? Of course. Permit us now to narrow the scope to one class of enzymes, the esterases. Li pases are esterases that split fats. Other
Suggestion to Ames, Iowa Cyanamide (note the " e " ; very, very, VERY important) is not stable. On that, Walter R. Hearn of Iowa State University and we agree. Dr. Hearn is interested in guanidation of amino groups in peptides and protein, i.e. RCHCOOHRCHCOOH i NH 2 NH )C=NH H2N This can be accomplished with cyana mide (H 2 NC^=N) and some of its de rivatives. There was a problem. In think ing of well known chemical houses with whom to take up a problem involving cyanamide, one doesn't necessarily think first of us, but Dr. Hearn had somehow formed the impression that we were friendly fellows. Another factor which might have contributed to his decision to write us was the fact that six bottles of
^ C H = N C H 2 C H 2 N = C H
cyanamide in his stockroom, which showed melting points as much as 150° higher than they were supposed to, hap pened to bear our PI 995 label. Well, sir, we did prove friendly. We pointed in a friendly way to the "Practical" on that label as an open ad mission that the Cyanamide probably wasn't all cyanamide, though it had been originally. We said that to retard dimerization we kept our stock of Cyanamide under refrigeration and advised him to do likewise. We suggested he reclaim the undimerized portion of his stock by dissolving in ten parts or more of ether, filtering off any dimer, and concentrating the filtrate below 35°C at all times. We warned him not to dissolve in less ether because he'd get dimer into solution. We also answered his question of why our Cyanamide (Practical) was 25 times as expensive as one of the cyanamide de rivatives that he used, our S-Methyl-2thiopseudourea Sulfate ( Eastman 1231), CH2COOH
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When we read the advance program for this year's Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry & Applied Spec troscopy, we decided on a coup. One of the papers was to state an interesting fact about bissalicylideneethylenediamine, which stands in relation to the well known chelating agent EDTA as
