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Garvan Medal to Apes Morgan - A - L S O R A N " is a word that could never be applied to Agnes F a y Morgan, who on Monday was announced as the 1949 Garvan Medal winner at the 115th na tional meeting of the ACS at San Fran cisco. She is usually first in whatever she tackles^ Dr. Morgan taught the first scientific human nutrition, courses at the University of California in 1915. Since that time she has built u p a department of home economics that is world famed. The medalist was first to observe the effect of sulfur dioxide on the vitamins: the protective effect on ascorbic acid and the damaging effect o n thiamine. She was first t o produce greying of hair through vitamin deficiency, first to ob serve damage to the adrenal glands caused by pantothenic acid deficiency, first to record heat damage to proteins, and first t o note certain supplementing effects of vitamin D on the physiologic activity of parathyroid extract. The interrelationships between vitamin and hormone activities have fascinated D r . Morgan for years. Three different relationships have claimed much of her experimental time: that of vitamin D and the parathyroid secretion; of vitamin A and carotene to thyroid secretion; and of adrenal gland secretion to riboflavin and pantothenic acid. Sincere interest in public health led D r . Morgan to her proof, via rats and dogs, that heat destroyed part of the nutritional value of proteins. Since these 1926 experiments, she has developed many chemical phases of the problem in order to discover the mechanism of this heat damage. Even a small decrease in the availability of amino acids from heated proteins may be of real importance in the nutrition of infants and children or per sons living o n limited diets where the amount of protein must be kept low. All of these important nutritional re searches began when Agnes Fay Morgan registered at the University of Chicago in 1902 and stayed on to earn the bachelor's, master's, and P h . D . degrees. After ma joring in physical and organic chemistry, the new Dr. Morgan examined her fields of study and observed that there were many highly competent young men also looking for similar jobs. She decided t o seek other related fields where there was less prejudice against women chemists. Her altruistic interest i n improving health and diet, plus an invitation t o teach dietetics at the University of California combined to lure her t o Berkeley in 1915. She has never regretted the move. A t that time there were only a few text books on nutrition written in German and one or two in English. There were some volumes on dietetics, b u t they were not sufficiently scientific to be used a s bases
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for a new course. T h e only two or three other similar programs of study were being taught o n the East Coast. One of the reasons D r . Morgan did research was t o find something new t o teach. During that period, other investigators reported the first vitamin research. From then on, t h e subject matter available for nutrition curricula increased exponentially. Dr. Morgan has filled many professional posts a t the University of California, be coming chairman o f the department of home economics in 1938. She spent four years during World War II working un der O S R D to improve food dehydration, with special reference to quality and nu tritive value. Her work led to a patented process for dehydrating scrapple. Dr. Morgan is a founder of the chem istry honorary society Iota Sigma Pi, of which she is permanent national secretary. So much for Agnes F a y Morgan the scientist, the teacher, the scholar, and the administrator, but what about the person? I n 1908, she married Arthur I bason
Morgan, a salesman for the Sperry Flour Co. of San Francisco, a General Mills subsidiary. In 1923, a son was born who later became a chemical engineering grad uate of Berkeley and who is now doing postgraduate work a t the Technische Hochschule in Zurich, Switzerland. Hobbies? Although she doesn't have much time for hobbies, Dr. Morgan does have more than a passing interest in cocker spaniels. A colony of these pure bred dogs has been maintained on the campus since 1939. Spaniels are excellent sub jects for nutritional subjects because they are a uniform strain, of medium size, a n docile and intelligent. After returning h o m e from a busy day on the campus, Dr. Morgan likes t o relax with a good mystery story. She prefers the British type of refined murder a s described by Dorothy Sayers, Carter Dickson, and Agatha Christie. Murder is perfectly acceptable as long as it i s com mitted in the best families and the corpse discovered by the old family retainer. All these facets of an extremely active life add up t o Agnes Fay Morgan. On Sept. 19, during the Atlantic City ACS meeting, she will receive the Garvan Medal as recognition for distinguished service t o chemistry by a woman chemist.
Color Analyzer Described JL HE use and design of a new computing device for the rapid calculation and inter pretation of t h e results of spectrophotometric analyses of dyed colors was ex plained before the annual meeting of the Optical Society of America in N e w York's Hotel Statler, March 10 to 12. T h e in strument, which w a s developed jointly by scientists of t h e General Aniline & Film Corp. and Librascope, Inc., was described in a paper by H . R . Davidson and L. W. I m m of the companies involved. T h e new device, which is known as an automatic, continuous tristimulus integrator, uses Selsyn transmitters to relay the wave length intelligence as gathered by the spectrophotometer t o the calculator where i t is integrated by means of mechanical analog techniques. The combination of t h e spectrophotometer and the integrator, t h e authors said, is usually more sensitive than the eye for the detection and evalua tion of small color differences. In a paper that followed on the same subject, I. H. Godlove of the General Aniline & Film Corp. claimed that the new device has been found to yield many results of interest -to the textile-dyeing field due to i t s higL· precision and timesaving characteristics. I t permits statis tical analyses to b e made rapidly, he added, and h a s proved valuable in ob taining a measure o f the unlevelness or nonuniformity of several dyeings. Frank S. T o m k i n s and Mark Fred of
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the Argonne National Laboratory and the Armour Research Foundation, in their paper brought out the point t h a t the spectra of the new heavy elements are usually as complex as those of uranium and thorium. For this reason, they said, descriptions of the spectra of these new elements must be very extensive a n d con tain complete, accurate wave-length in formation. Unfortunately, due t o this difficulty, it will be some time before such descriptions will b e available w i t h this accuracy. In the meantime it would be useful for spectrochemical o analyses t o have wavelengths to 0.1 A. units and intensities in a convenient spectral region. Such information, the paper con cluded, has already been gathered for several newly isolated elements. T h e description of new techniques for the spectrochemical analysis of nonmetallic samples was given in the paper by M. F. Hasler and C. E. Harvey of the Applied Research Laboratories. T h e first of those they mentioned involves a m e t h o d of vaporizing and collecting a nonmetallic sample in a manner that reduces i t to a standard chemical and crystallographic form. A second method described i n t h e paper is one of sparking to the edge of a rotating disk, comprised of the nonmetallic sample and a binder. A com bination of these methods, the authors concluded, has been successfully employed in the usually difficult analysis of mica.
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