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I N D U S T R I A L A N D ENGINEERING CHEiMIXTRY
Secretary of the Interior to acquire land or interest in land by purchase, lease, or condemnation where necessary, and to explore for, conserve, and extract helium gas, and give the Government the ownership and right to extract helium from all gas produced from public lands. Under these bills conservation would be effected largely by gaining possession of such geological formations as now hold the gas, and keeping it there imprisoned until needed. The bills also provide funds to erect plants to extract, purify, and supply helium to the Army and Navy, and also to lease to American citizens or American corporations under suitable regulations, any surplus helium not needed by the Government, moneys derived from this source being credited to a helium production account, with residual gas after helium extraction being sold for the benefit of the miscellaneous receipts of the Treasury. The bills also forbid the exportation of helium from the United States or its possessions without express permission from the Secretary of the Interior. They further endeavor to combine the activities of the Army and Navy with those of the Department of the Interior in carrying out a constructive helium program. The bills do not interfere with the private development of helium, and their enactment would not create a condition in any way harmful to commercial aeronautics. We are in accord with the spirit of these bills, and chemists, appreciating the importance of this element, are sympathetic toward any program designed to effect conservation through scientific development and efficient use.
Travel of Scientists T T H E Washington meeting the Council passed resolutions A favoring more liberal regulations and laws go.verning the attendance of scientific workers in Government departments upon scientific conventions and congresses. These resolutions were sent to the several departments involved and have met in most instances with sympathetic reception. At least two of the great Government departments have stated that they will continue to send scientific workers to conventions and congresses whenever possible under the limitations of available appropriations and where it is clear that these expenditures are made in the public interest. We quote from one of the official responses:
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I am very much pleased to note the action of your Society and that of other associations and trust that your efforts will result in a more universal understanding of the benefits to be derived from this system. We have, in expressing the matter to Congressional committees, stated that it is impossible for the Department to maintain national leadership if its representatives are not present a t the conferences in which policies and programs of action are being worked out, and we have found an almost universal appreciation and support of the sentiment.
The present practice which greatly limits the attendance of scientific men upon these meetings is said to have originated, as nearly all restrictions do, in an abuse of privileges. The story is that some years ago two members of the Washington police force made a junket a t Government expense which so aroused some members of Congress that restrictions were put in force. The practice of allowing only those scientists to attend meetings who have papers upon the program is not always satisfactory. Some have even thought that it has led to the presentation of summaries without introduction of new results or the reports of uncompleted work, whereas results might have been better had the paper been delayed until the data were complete. Often procedure upon a piece of uncompleted research may be influenced directly by one of those formal or informal discussions such as characterize our meetings. The extent of research under Government auspices and the variety of topics in hand is such that no scientific meeting is complete without a. reasonable representation from the
Vol. 16, No. 9
Government laboratories. We hope ways and means may be found to increase the number who can attend. We have frequently emphasized the returns possible in the case of corporations paying expenses of their scientists to such meetings, and these same arguments hold true not only in the case of Government employees but also where institutions of learning are involved. One of the best ways of inducing narrowness is to confine a scientist to his laboratory or his study and keep him out of contact with his fellows with whom’he has a common interest.
Chemistry Not Warlike I N T H E I R effort to give full credit to the part played by chemistry during the Great War, our daily, weekly, and monthly press has succeeded in giving the science a reputation which it does not deserve. Chemistry becomes destructive only of those things which threaten our lives and when called upon to act in self-defense. The Harvard Alumni Bulletin in a recent number comments editorially upon chemistry and medicine with special reference to “Chemistry in the Service of Medicine,” a pamphlet issued by the Committee to Extend the Kational Service of Harvard University. As the editorial points out, “One of the minor consequences of the war has been that in the minds of many people the work of chemists is associated with destructive discoveries and inventions. The idea that laboratory experiments are concerned to a large extent with an effort to increase the deadliness of poison gas and the power of high explosives is prevalent. Chemists are looked upon as persons who are in cold blood preparing weapons with which mankind may eventually exterminate itself .” The pamphlet discusses typical problems in the solution of which chemistry has been important, and indicates some of the accomplishments that may be expected if research is adequately supported in future. The presence in this country of a former expert in the Chemical Division of the British Army, who believes he has a method for the eradication of the famous cotton boll weevil, brings to mind another example of the peace-time application of knowledge gained in chemical warfare service. Still another is the use of chloropicrin to displace heat in smothering silkworm cocoons, the process being superior as far as cost is concerned and easier to control than heat. The silk obtainable from cocoons smothered by chloropicrin differs in no way as regards elasticity, tenacity, and ease of degumming from that obtained from cocoons killed by heat. A further illustration may be taken from the extensive work performed by our Chemical Warfare Service on the protection of marine piling and other structures from the toredo borer, which in one harbor in a single year recently did damage estimated a t nineteen million dollars. The fight against the borer, in progress for many years, has, until nom, met with indifferent success. It is doubtful whether such preparations as have shown themselves highly effective in large-scale trials would have been developed without the acquisition of that great mass of special toxicological information which has been brought together at Edgewood. With these and many other accomplishments to the credit of peace-time activities of the chemists in the Chemical Warfare Service, it seems a pity that the name of that corps was not chosen to avoid placing arguments on the lips of those who see only the word ‘‘warfare,“ and do not comprehend itsreal chemical service. Had the Medical Corps been called the Medical Warfare Service, we wonder what stories the pacifists might have devised. It is probably too late t o make a change in the name of the Chemical Warfare Service, but it is never too late to have the public understand the real nature of its work and the real importance of its information.
