Science: Industrial Microbes

The enslavement and death of countless millions of workers may result from a newly discovered method of producing glycerine (currently produced as a byproduct of soap manufacture). Whether the process reported by Canada’s National Research Council in Ottawa will be adopted commercially depends largely on the efficiency of the workers’ digestive apparatus. In any case, no one will protest their exploitation. The workers are microscopic members of the clan Bacillus subtilis.

The use of microbes as minuscule chemical factories has been practiced, if not understood, since the first butter was churned, the first wine pressed, the first beer brewed. Spurred by advances in the field of biochemistry and the pressures of two wars, the employment of microbe labor has recently spread to a whole new field of chemical manufacture. Little is known of the actual metabolic process by which microbes work, but by careful control and endless experiment chemists and biologists, working together, have been able to set them hundreds of chemical tasks.

Best known of these industrial microorganisms is yeast, whose appetite for the carbohydrates in beets, sugar cane, wood, and other fibrous vegetable matter made possible the production in 1944 of about 638 million gallons of alcohol—grain and wood. But the yeasts are only one group of the microbic multitude able to perform specific jobs. Bacteria resembling the bacilli of human ailments and molds like mildew have also been put to work in industry.

Some microbes have done double jobs. One, fed in a certain way, yields oxalic acid, basic chemical of the blueprint industry; on a different diet it produces the gluconic acid used in medicines. The versatile Clostridium acetobutylicum, on a single diet of corn mash, produces acetone for solvents, butanol for automobile lacquers, and riboflavin (Vitamin 62).

Grasshoppers and Cantaloupes. In a constant search for new microscopic workers, industrial, university and Government researchers have isolated over 200,000 varieties. Useful microbes may turn up anywhere—in the air, on the water, on forest leaf mold, in city garbage cans. A potent industrial bacillus was discovered in the intestines of a grasshopper. The best strain of the mold Penicillium notatum, which makes life-saving penicillin, was first noticed on a cantaloupe rind.

Despite their humble origins, microbes are as temperamental as coloraturas. They are fussy about temperature, about food, and about the company they keep. Some like plenty of air, some like none, and some govern their behavior according to whether they get it or not. In an airless, quiet place, yeast will produce wine ; in air it just reproduces itself. To keep such un reliable workers healthy, happy, and productive is the responsibility of a growing new species of industrial scientist, the biological engineer. His job: to reproduce on a factory scale biological processes and conditions none too easy to control in a laboratory test tube.

Biological Engineering. Leaders in the development of this field have been technicians of such firms as Brooklyn’s Charles Pfizer & Co., one of the oldest of the fermentation chemical makers and a big producer of penicillin. They have devised techniques that smack less of a factory than of the contagion ward of a hospital.

The production of penicillin, which is typical of most fermentation processes, starts from a small culture of the mold growing on a mixture of water, sugar and some nitrogenous food. A 10,000-gal. vat of nutrient may be charged with as much as 100 gal. of this mixture, which has been kept sterilized so that no impurity can possibly be present. Should another, different microbe find his way in, the batch would be spoiled. In theory, all that is necessary to start production is to introduce the microscopic microbe into the large vat. In practice, the vats are inoculated with the larger cultures, to save time, but at the end of three days the biological engineer may find the clear, brownish liquid filled with the clusters of strawlike gold that he had hoped to produce. Or he may find only an accumulation of horrible smells.

Microbe Mysteries. The biologist is often completely in the dark as to why his microbes fail so dismally, when they do. Cross contamination of one culture by another is a common cause. To prevent it at Pfizer’s, no two chemicals are made in the same building. Workers with coughs or sneezes are kept away, and those going in & out are thoroughly sterilized and dressed like hospital interns. Filtered air and ultra violet light are constantly at work.

In spite of all precautions, the microbes find ways to flout their keepers. A simon-pure culture may sometimes, apparently from sheer perversity, change its nature.

After such a mutation, it may produce a better product, a worse product, or an entirely different product. Biologists are no more certain of the reason for this than they are of the nature of the sub-microscopic organisms which plague the microbes themselves. Absenteeism among microbe workers is no problem, but in at least one factory devoted to the manufacture of essential chemical solvents, all work had to be stopped for days because the microbes themselves got sick.