News of the Week position of crystalline polypropyl ene and not on a use or process, Phillips, in effect, owns polypropyl ene rights in the U.S. Of the 11 U.S. producers of poly propylene, excluding Phillips, only three have licenses from the oil company: Atlantic Richfield, Gulf Oil, and Standard Oil (Ind.). With the granting of the patent, Phillips filed infringement suits against the other producers—Eastman Kodak, El Paso Polyolefins, Exxon, Hercules, Northern Petrochemical, Shell Oil, Soltex Polymer, and U.S. Steel. L. N. French, general patent coun sel for Phillips, says the company is offering nonexclusive licenses un der the newly issued patent to oth er U.S. producers. The patent also covers polypropylene brought into the U.S., so that licenses will be available to importers. The companies that are not li censed by Phillips have about 80% of U.S. polypropylene capacity. A Phillips spokesman says the compa ny estimated royalty fees from the licenses, based on current produc tion and licensing all U.S. producers, at about $5 million per year at the royalty rate that is included in Phillips' licensing agreement. He also says that the company probably will not try to apply its p a t e n t overseas, but will move strongly against importers. The patent infringement suits will be dropped if the companies agree to the nonexclusive licenses. D
U.S. agriculture faces manpower shortage American agriculture has enough crises these days to fill all the Grain Belt's silos. Fertilizer and agricultur al chemical companies are facing slumps; farmers continue to leave the land; the land itself is eroding and degrading catastrophically; com modity prices are disastrous. No one is happy these days about farming. On top of all that, the Depart ment of Agriculture unveiled an other crisis last week, this one in volving manpower. A report from USDA's Office of Higher Education says the boom years of the 1970s are over. That was w h e n young 8
March 21, 1983 C&EN
people, ignited by environmental zeal, were seeking degrees in the agricultural sciences in vast num bers. A shortage now looms, and Agricultural Research Service direc tor Terry B. Kinney says he is worried. He says that if the U.S. hopes to compete in world agricul tural markets, it will have to main tain a strong supply of agricultural professionals. The USDA report forecasts a need for 59,780 new agricultural gradu ates between now and 1985. Supply projections amount to only 51,976. The figures, of course, cannot be totally certified because agricultur al employment needs never have been seriously projected up until now. In any case, for the two sectors of most interest to scientists, the re port concludes that the supply of "scientific and professional special ists" would meet only 92% of the demand through 1985. Only 82% of
projected needs for "manufacturing and processing scientists and engi neers" would be met. The total num bers needed in each category are 14,986 and 5544, respectively. People who are seeking academic careers but are discouraged by the job markets in universities these days can take heart, at least from this report. The agricultural colleges will be needing lots of new faculty members during the 1980s, especial ly in soil science, animal science, water resources, wood science, and agriculture's many fields of biology. Thus, students who use a chemistry major to spin off into other careers could find occupational fertility in an agricultural career. The project ed supply of masters and doctoral graduates is especially bad, the re port says, although it doesn't give numbers. And vocational schools are expected to need between 600 and 800 new teachers annually during the 1980s. Π
Meteorite came from the Moon, tests suggest A little piece of rock found last year in Antarctica is almost certainly a meteorite from the Moon, accord ing to evidence presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Con ference in Houston. Also, evidence is accumulating to suggest that an other group of meteorites may have come from Mars. At the meeting, University of Chi cago chemists Robert N. Clayton and Toshiko K. Mayeda revealed the re sults of oxygen isotope measure ments of the Antarctica meteorite, showing that its isotopic content is identical to that of lunar rocks brought to Earth by Apollo 16. The meteorite also is similar mineralogically to those Moon rocks. Mea surements of iron-manganese ratios (by other scientists) are also consis tent with a lunar origin. Clayton explains that planets, asteroids, and bodies that broke up to form meteorites all have charac teristic oxygen isotope compositions, determined by the conditions that existed at the time of their accretion. The oxygen isotope composition of the Antarctica meteorite is the same as that found only on Earth, the Moon, and the body that broke up
to form a small class of meteorites called aubrites. Earth and the aubrites are quite different chemically from the meteorite, Clayton says, which leaves the Moon as the like ly origin. The finding proves that rocks can be transported across interplanetary space, probably by being ejected dur ing an asteroid impact, Clayton says. Now that scientists know that, he adds, they can look even more care fully at a group of rare meteorites— too young to have come from the Moon—that some scientists believe came from Mars. Recent support for that belief has come from physicist Robert O. Pepin and coworkers at the University of Minnesota. That group subjected a sample of one of those younger me teorites to sensitive mass spectro metry analysis and found that the ratio of nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14 was much higher than in terrestrial materials. However, the ratio wasn't as high as that existing in the Mar tian atmosphere, as determined by Viking missions to Mars; one expla nation for the difference is that the meteorite may have absorbed nitro gen from Earth's atmosphere. D
