December 10, 2007

Volume 85, Number 50

pp. 2-4

Ethanol in Motor Fuels

The article on renewable fuels makes apparent that the objective of using ethanol in U.S. automotive fuel has shifted away from smog-reducing fuel oxygenation, for which it was introduced in additive concentrations a few decades ago, toward the complete substitution of crude oil as feedstock (C&EN, Sept. 17, page 28). The article also points out some of the drawbacks of ethanol, most notably that it is hydrophilic, unlike the fuel additive ethers methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE), and tert-amyl methyl ether (TAME), which ethanol has recently displaced in the U.S., ostensibly on environmental grounds.

In contrast to the U.S., in Europe ether oxygenate usage has not aroused legislative ire. Fuel ether is, after all, undoubtedly less toxic than the benzene, which evidently also seeps from leaky U.S. gasoline station tanks. Now that U.S. motives have been clarified, isn't it time that the dubious environmental objections against ether fuel oxygenates be reconsidered by the state and federal bodies that raised them?

Jonathan Targett
London

Genentech Not First Biotech

As a longtime subscriber to C&EN and a 25-year ACS member, I must respond to a serious mistake made in the article on Herbert Boyer (C&EN, Sept. 10, page 26). Other than this error, I enjoyed the article.

The article states that Boyer formed the world's first biotechnology company, Genentech. This is incorrect. In 1971, a full five years earlier, Cetus Corp. was established in Berkeley, Calif., by Ronald Cape, a biochemist; Peter Farley, a physician; and Don Glaser, a Nobel Laureate physicist, among others. Indeed, they started the company a year or two before publication of the exciting discovery of recombinant DNA by Stan Cohen and Paul Berg of Stanford University and Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco.

I was lucky enough to join other Cetus consultants such as Cohen and Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg as advisers to the company at its very start. The vision of the founders of Cetus resulted in a major industry serving the needs of patients throughout the world and revolutionizing the practice of industrial microbiology and agricultural technology.

Although it was incorporated into Chiron Corp. in the mid-1990s, and then later into Novartis, Cetus should long be remembered as the founder of modern biotechnology and the home of the inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique of enormous importance in forensic medicine and basic science. The discoverer of PCR was Kary Mullis of Cetus, who holds the first and probably the only Nobel Prize ever awarded to an employee of the biotechnology industry.

Arnold L. Demain
Madison, N.J.

Freely Informed

Thanks for the editorial "The Google Model" (C&EN, Nov. 5, page 3). Isn't the issue here one of accountability? With payment for information comes accountability for veracity, whereas with free information there is little distinction between truth and fiction.

Danny LevinLa Cañada
Flintridge, Calif.

I agree that information "doesn't give a damn." But its users are readers and students who want information—they're not just "cheapskates."

Michael Stitelman
Branford, Conn.

Larvadex and Melamine

The Food & Drug Administration's excuse for not finding melamine in imported food is that they "were not looking for it" (C&EN, Sept. 24, page 83).

Melamine is the main degradation product of cyromazine (Larvadex) and causes bladder tumors and stones. Larvadex is a suspected fetotoxin. They are both triazines.

Larvadex is a pesticide fed to poultry to inhibit insect development in chicken feces. When fed to grazing animals, the poison kills the dung beetles that bury cow manure. The excessive accumulation of excrement on pastures supposedly stopped the use of Larvadex in some countries. Perhaps this is not true in China, where melamine-contaminated food originated.

Tests for Larvadex detected it in chicken muscle and eggs. Obviously, neither Larvadex nor melamine should be in human food. Why wasn't FDA looking for them? Why do we allow Larvadex to be fed to animals we plan to eat? Why do we allow a laundry list of actual garbage, from arsenic to feathers, to become part of our food supply?

J. J. Jacobson
Austin, Texas

Pollution in China

"China's Cancer Villages" provides a rather detailed focus on the obvious and horrible local consequences of pollution, but there is another very important angle to this story that may have global implications (C&EN, Oct. 29, page 18). The article refers to the affected people as "farmers." Clearly, they are the most directly affected.

However, if the drinking water is indeed polluted, those pollutants are also likely to be in the water the farm crops receive and in the soil in which those crops are grown. That being the case, the contaminants' impact goes as far as the crops from those lands go. In a global economy, that can be very far. A scenario such as this highlights how regional decisions can have global consequences and how, in a global economy, the consequences of regional decisions can be significant far beyond the domain of regional decisionmakers.

The article did an excellent job covering the local impact, but I would hope that the more far-reaching impact is also considered.

Patrick McLoughlin
Pittsburgh

Oh, Behave

I loved the article "Butt In To Butt Out" (C&EN, Oct. 29, page 31). Once a month I pick up all the litter in front of my house. It is mostly butts left by an unknown "Marlboro Man"—almost all are that brand—who flicks his or her butts into my driveway, probably while waiting for the traffic light to change. I have often threatened to create a monument out of them at the sidewalk next to my mailbox for all to see.

Cars still come equipped with ashtrays. Why can't people use them? Yes, some do, and then empty them in a parking lot! This behavior is scary as well, because I live in Southern California, where fires have been raging all around me. I continue to see folks toss burning butts from car windows while driving down freeways next to tinder-dry brush.

Annemarie R. Wheeler
Yorba Linda, Calif.

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