Science: Rare Business

A well-guarded brick building in Chicago houses what may well be the most priceless card index in the U.S. The index belongs to a young chemist named Martin H. Heeren. The cards bear strange titles.

Sample: “Michler’s ketone, or C17H20ON2 or 4,4′ Tetramethyl-diaminooenzophe-none.”

Martin Heeren’s job is huntingrare chemicals not sold by supply houses. U.S. chemists apply to his National Registry of Rare Chemicals to find missing ingredients for their experiments that it would take them weeks or months to concoct themselves—if they could make them at all. In its 16 months, the Registry has solved thousands of such problems; today it locates rare chemicals not only for chemistry laboratories but for Government agencies, the Army, even foreign governments.

Set up by Chicago’s Armour Research Foundation, the Registry was started partly because the Foundation once took a month to locate a substance called “1,1 dichlorol 1 nitro ethane” needed on a rush job.The Registry makes no chemicals itself, merely acts as a clearinghouse. It now lists some 7,000 items that U.S. chemists are willing to share, can lay its hands on a requested chemical three times out of four.

Usually available only in minute quantities (the average request is for a single gram), these chemicals are ordinarily left overs or by-products of chemists’ experiments. Their value runs as high as $1,000 a gram, but in most cases chemists supply them free, expecting reciprocity. As go-between, Heeren often conducts negotiations between parties who remain anonymous lest they give away trade secrets by revealing that they are working with a telltale material.

Heeren is seldom told what a chemical is wanted for, but in most cases he can make a shrewd guess. Because many a chemical, like Michler’s ketone, is known by more than one name, Heeren’s file is a complicated affair. Once a chemist asked for sodium propionate; after long research Heeren discovered that this rarity was made in hundreds of tons as an insecticide under the trade name “Mycoban.” He learned to watch out for requests from cranks and small-boy amateurs who some times ask for dangerous ingredients. His mail varies between advanced chemical information and items that might be framed in a madhouse.

Of the many odd chemicals Heeren has been offered, the most unusual was one which its inventor claimed would give mankind eternal life. One of the most recent requests was for stallion’s urine.

Heeren quickly located a company that specialized in producing just that.