Science: Little, Dancing Moneymaker

Wah-wah-taysee, little firefly, Little, flitting white-fire insect, Little, dancing white-fire creature, Light me with your little candle, Ere upon my bed I lay me, Ere in sleep I close my eyelids.

Longfellow’s little Hiawatha loved fireflies. So do today’s kids. So, in a professional sense, do many scientists, who recognize the firefly’s light as a love call—but are both baffled and fascinated by its heatless, chemically generated properties. As of last week a chemical company, Schwartz Bio-Research Inc. of Mount Vernon,N.Y.,had found a happy way of 1) letting children turn their firefly chasing to profit, 2) putting firefly tails to practical human use, and 3) offering hope that science may soon solve the longstanding puzzle of the little white-fire insect.

On the market was a Schwartz offering of dehydrated firefly tails at $5 per gram as a sensitive test for ATP—adenosine tri-phosphate—a vital chemical that is found in nearly all living cells. When ATP is added to an extract of firefly tails, the solution lights up, and the amount of light given off is proportionate to the amount of ATP. By measuring the light, the ATP can itself be measured.

The Schwartz company gets its fireflies from the southern states of the U.S., where they are collected by youngsters and shipped to Mount Vernon on dry ice. In charge of the 1960 firefly hunt was Marc Cohn, now 19, the son of an atomic scientist at Oak Ridge, Tenn. During the 1960 season he and his teams collected more than 1,000,000 flashing firefly tails —at 30¢ per 100.