And at the new Dart & Kraft, formed recently by the merger of Kraft Inc. and Dart Industries, John M. Richman will be chairman of the board and chief executive officer. He had held these positions at Kraft. Justin Dart, who had been chairman and chief executive officer of Dart Industries, will be chairman of the executive committee for the new company and will continue as chair man of the board and chief executive officer of the Dart Industries subsid iary. Meanwhile, the Infernal Reve nue Service has ruled that the merger is tax free. D
Synthetic fuel projects proliferate Now that the Department of Energy has $5 billion to spend on proposals for synthetic fuels projects (C&EN, Sept. 8, page 7), there is no lack of entrepreneurs with ideas to con sider. Two of these projects are on the drawing boards at Allied Chemical, which represent that firm's first step into the field. Allied is prime con tractor for two projects to build coal liquefaction plants based on Dynalectron Corp.'s Η-Coal technology in Dungannon, Va., and Lancaster, N.Y. The companies have joined with those states to propose feasibility studies to DOE. Each plant would turn 25,000 tons of coal per day into about 40,000 bbl per day each of gas oline and home heating oil, with the first product scheduled for 1986. In another company's proposal, coal also would be the feed for a Buf falo, Wyo., plant to produce about 130 million cu ft per day of substitute natural gas and 55,000 bbl per day of methanol from almost 40,000 tons per day of coal. A feasibility study for this plant has been proposed by Transwestern Coal Gasification Co. of Houston, which is owned jointly by Texaco and Texas Eastern Corp. Coal gasification also is of interest as a utility fuel source. Fluor Engi neers & Constructors, Irvine, Calif., recently has received a contract from Arkansas Power & Light Co. and Tosco Corp. to study feasibility, technology, and environmental im pact of a plant in southern Arkansas to produce an amount of substitute natural gas equivalent to 12,000 bbl of oil per day from petroleum coke and perhaps eventually from coal and oil refinery residuals. The gas would be piped to cogeneration plants throughout the state. DOE also has awarded a design contract to Combustion Engineering for a demonstration plant to convert 8
C&EN Oct. 6, 1980
1400 tons per day of high-sulfur coal to 225 million cu ft per day of low-Btu gas for a Gulf States Utilities power plant at West Lake, La. Consumers Power Co. has proposed a feasibility study to DOE for conversion of 1.2
million kw of capacity at Bay City, Mich., from oil to gas derived from high-sulfur coal. Capacity would be raised to 1.7 million kw by addition of turbines for cogeneration of electric ity and steam. D
New way off looking at c< ncer causes proposed British scientist John Cairns is pro- I posing a provocative and potentially important new way of looking at— and, by extension, looking for— agents that cause cancer. He says that cancer may not be caused so much by single, isolated ' mutational events in DNA as'by more widespread disruptions in the genetic material, in which "whole chunks" of DNA are moved around so as to throw off a cell's normal state of control. Cairns, who is head of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund at Mill Hill Laboratories in London, presented his ideas at the close of a week-long International Symposium on Aging & Cancer, held in Washington, D.C. In framing his ideas, Cairns has drawn on several recent developments in fundamental molecular biology and on findings taken more directly from experiences in the cancer clinic. So far, the two sets of observations are tied together only by a loose knot, however. For example, Cairns bases some of his conclusions on informa tion derived from cases of a disease called xeroderma pigmentosa. The disease is rare, and data are sparse because it frequently causes early death. Xeroderma pigmentosa is a genetic disorder that gives patients a greatly increased sensitivity to ultraviolet light and hence a high incidence of skin tumors. Such patients are de prived of a crucial biochemical system
Cairns; disruptive agents
that ordinarily can correct sunlightinflicted damage to DNA. Normally, that same system also corrects similar damage to DNA inflicted from other sources. Cairns argues—and this is crucial to his hypothesis—that xeroderma pigmentosa patients do not have a higher than normal incidence of other tumors, despite their internal organs' lacking the same DNA repair system missing from their skin cells. There fore, he says, agents that cause local ized damage in DNA (mutations, in other words) "may not be the main problem in cancer." To be sure, they sometimes can be a problem, as when they overwhelm the skin cells of xeroderma patients. But such agents as ultraviolet light or many familiar mutagens might not be the source of the majority of cancers. Nonetheless, several decades of laboratory research point to DNA as being a key target during transfor mation of a cell into malignant growth. Here, Cairns makes some thing of an intuitive leap into recent molecular biology developments in continuing his argument. In particu lar, he cites evidence that certain genes in higher cells are interrupted by seemingly silent regions of DNA and that some genes (and pieces of genes) can move from one place among neighboring genes to an other. "Disruptive agents that drive such changes may be responsible for causing cancer," he says. Presumably such changes could exert the sort of profound regulatory disruptions as sociated with malignant growth of cells. The argument is logical but by no means definitive. For instance, there may be considerable overlap among agents that cause localized damage in DNA and those that exert the more global translocations envisioned by Cairns, says Bruce N. Ames of the University of California, Berkeley. Ames' bacteria-based mutagenscreening test is used widely to hunt for potential carcinogens. "You may need rearrangements [of DNA to cause cancer]. I suspect that that's right," Ames says. "But you may not need a whole special class of agents. There are not many examples that cause one kind of damage and not the other." Π
