The Sun Chemist

by Lionel Davidson

  I was in Weizmann’s old lab; he’d worked here a bit soon after it was put up in the thirties. It was now Professor Sprinzak’s lab, and he’d ushered me over to the corner where Dr Finster was muttering at a small fermenter. There was that unsettling smell of a strong gas leak and of chemicals that had always instilled such dread on entering the school laboratory. The place had a cluttered, old-fashioned look: shelves crammed with jars, benches with retorts and Bunsen burners; numerous experiments seemed to be under way.

  I sat on a high stool and looked at disaffected Dr Finster and his fermenter. It was a cylindrical affair of stainless steel, electrically heated. Tubes and retorts issued from it to a glass jar. In the cylinder was Dan’s mashed potato – ‘We first must make a mash of our raw starting material’ – and in the jar what seemed to be a lot of water.

  ‘That’s it, is it?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. This is the product of fermentation.’

  He inclined the jar toward me and took the top off. Rather a pleasing and wholesome fragrance came out of the jar, not immediately placeable but strangely familiar, all the same. It didn’t smell at all of potatoes. I looked more closely at the absolutely anonymous liquid. Was this the secret stuff of life? He had been talking rather a lot about life forms.

  ‘Does fusel oil smell like this?’ I said.

  Dr Finster placed his own nose over the jar. It was a powerful and useful-looking organ, and the end of it quivered delicately as he made his observation.

  ‘Yes. Very like. By no means unlike fusel oil. However, it is not fusel oil.’

  ‘No.’ I could imagine Winogradsky’s nostrils fluting excitedly over it seventy years ago, and Weizmann’s, more critically and subtly, a few years later. ‘What happens to it now?’ I said.

  ‘What happens to it is whatever one wants to happen. It is a very basic substance,’ Dr Finster said wearily. ‘I will explain again.’

  I listened with more determination this time.

  Organic chemistry was the chemistry of living or once-living forms. It was largely the chemistry of carbon. The carbon came in some way from the sun, and growing vegetable matter synthesized it into starch, sugar, and other substances. Animals ate the vegetables, and people ate animals, together with vegetables. But whether they were eating it or wearing it, making furniture out of it or burning it, they were utilizing the energy originally supplied by the sun, and thus participating in the carbon cycle.

  Vegetable matter that had in some way got out of the cycle by escaping contemporary use had become fossilized. It was recoverable in the form of coal, shale, peat, oil, and so on, and the solar energy in it was also recoverable, by scientific means. The simplest scientific means, as in the case of coal, was to put a match to it; it would then release, in the form of heat and light, some part of the original far more lavish solar contribution. This was a crude means of conversion, and Dr Finster said so.

  ‘However, if we are to regard this as fuel,’ he said, giving the jar a little shake, ‘all we have done is to accelerate the natural process. We have taken vegetable material and allowed certain bacteria to break it down into alcohols and other substances. This certainly is what nature has done to make oil. But in nature it has occurred over millions of years, while here we have done it in hours.’

  ‘And this is what Weizmann has done?’ I said, falling easily into his preferred perfect tense.

  ‘Yes. He has done it with maize. He isolated certain bacteria – in fact, certain Clostridia – that he observed with the maize. And he has set them to work, by making a fermentation, to digest the starch in the maize.’

  ‘I thought he got acetone out of it.’

  ‘Here also we have acetone, and other substances.’

  ‘And what has Vava done?’

  ‘He has worked with Ipomoea batatas,’

  ‘I see,’ I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Dr. Finster looked at me. He looked as if he would like to help, but didn’t know how.

  ‘As between Vava’s batatas and Weizmann’s maize,’ I said, ‘is there much difference, Doctor Finster?’

  ‘With the result? There are differences. I have not found the great differences that Vava has told him.’

  ‘How do we know what Vava told him?’

  ‘Ah!’ Dr Finster went to a box file, lying on its side. There was an open lab book inside, with a ball-point pen in it. He removed this and took out a paper lying underneath. It was a photostat, which I remembered as soon as I saw it, of the letter to Fritz Haber that I had sent Connie months ago. There was only page 2 of the letter. Haber had been having difficulty settling his affairs in Germany. The government had imposed a levy on all Jews leaving the country. He had earlier pointed out to Weizmann that scientists who had gone to Turkey had been released from payment of this levy on the intervention of the Turkish government, with whom Germany was on friendly terms. Weizmann had not got anywhere with Ramsay MacDonald on this question, but he had written to the great Rutherford at Cambridge (where Haber had been invited) to use his scientific influence. He was telling Haber this. Then he went on to various gossipy items. The ringed paragraph was in the middle of the page.

  Was den guten Vava betrifft, er ist unverbesserlich. Er hat mit mir letztens an der Protein Frage …

  ‘You read German?’ Dr Finster asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  *

  As to the good Vava, he is of course incorrigible. He has been working with me lately on the protein question, but has been waylaid by more basic interests. He has discovered a variety of Ipomoea batatas together with a paying guest which will give it, as he has written to me by every post, an octane number of 150. This will hasten to its destined place the food in question, but the unfortunates who eat it will not come back for more!

  *

  ‘This is all!’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is the “paying guest”?’

  ‘A bacterium, evidently. This is Bergmann’s understanding.’

  ‘And you are working with this bacterium?’

  ‘No. How can we know what Vava has worked with?’

  ‘Ah.’ Light began to dawn.’ Or the variety of – batatas?’

  ‘We are working here with the common Ipomoea batatas.’ Full daylight set in.

  ‘You are not getting an octane number of 150,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing like it.’

  ‘If you had Vava’s batatas and also his bacterium, you might get an octane number of 150?’

  ‘But this is what he is saying!’

  ‘Yes.’

  It had taken some time to get there. As Meyer had said, with chemical things you had to persevere.

  2

  The Chancellor was exceptionally natty that night, the host to a select small gathering. He had got the Sassoons and the Wykes, and also, to balance numbers, Professor Marta Tuomisalo (Shirley remembering that we had got on well together during my last visit). Conversation with this professor of advanced mathematics had at first been difficult, with much confusing talk of parameters, until I had observed, with reciprocated approval, that she had got a very fine pair of her own. Our intercourse had extended after that, and had been consummated last June at the Galei Kinneret Hotel in Tiberias. We shook hands very cordially and I inquired after her husband and two fine boys. Marta returned my kindly greeting and said that all was well at Helsinki.

  Felicia Sassoon watched this with an observant eye and gave me a kiss. She worked in the Institute’s administration. ‘Well, Igor, how are things in your village?’ Her husband, Michael, was smiling behind her, and we shook hands. His short-back-and-sides gave his head the rather endearingly English look of a promising Oxford undergraduate of a previous generation, which he had been. He was now a rather senior professor on the campus.

  ‘Igor!’ Marie-Louise Wyke enclosed me in a warm embrace. Her slightly sodden appearance was unearned because she didn’t drink a drop. Her husband, the prospective Nobel Prize winner, helped in this equation, and he
threw a bearlike arm round me, the other holding his glass, while greeting me in Russian. He had spent a year in Moscow and liked to air his bits of the tongue.

  All of this was very convivial and a happy party ensued.

  After it, Meyer took me to one side. ‘What is this son of a bitch of yours gabbing all over London? Doesn’t he know what the oil interests are doing to us?’

  ‘What are the oil interests doing to us?’

  ‘My God, we have here a clear breakthrough. Oil can be available to any country that wants it! Cheaply. Cheaper than those bastards are blackmailing everybody into paying. We have something of inestimable advantage to the world. We will not take from them a cent! We will freely make available the knowledge. It is what the Chief would want!’ He always referred to Weizmann as ‘the Chief.’

  ‘Meyer, old friend,’ I said. He had drunk very abstemiously but I had not. ‘We have not got the knowledge. Nor had the Chief. He did not understand the knowledge. He thought Vava was making some new kind of laxative.’

  ‘He did not. He dictated many memos. Didn’t you speak to Bergmann yet?’

  ‘I didn’t yet.’

  ‘You’ll speak to him!’ he said grimly. ‘If your son of a bitch had only –’

  ‘But, Meyer, I’m no scientist –’

  ‘Scientists we have! It isn’t science. It’s’ a needle in a haystack they’re looking for. Igor, I tell you, it’s something tremendous. At the end-he foresaw what would come with the Arabs here. He foresaw the opening up of their oil fields, which they didn’t have at the time. Their asses were hanging out at the time. He wrote the most prophetic memo to Churchill. But this is old history.’

  He’d been moving to the telephone, and suddenly stopped. ‘Goddam it. He left today for the States, Bergmann. This is why we needed – So it will have to be Weiss.’ He paused uncertainly. ‘He goes to bed early, Weiss. He is kind of an old seventy. Even yet not seventy. Give me Weiss,’ he said into the phone. He did his little shuffle while waiting, looking up at me from his eyebrows. ‘What did you arrange for tomorrow?’

  ‘I didn’t arrange anything for tomorrow.’

  ‘Weiss? Well, hello, for God’s sake. It’s Meyer. I have here Igor Druyanov, who wants to come and see you in Jerusalem tomorrow … Druyanov. The son. With regard to Vava Kutcholsky. Wake up there, Weiss, you’re getting old or something? Of course the ketones. Exactly. So when? I’ll ask him … Can you make it by eleven? ‘he said to me.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

  ‘Eleven is perfect. Very good. In the laboratory. So go to bed Weiss. You sound tired.’

  ‘You are seeing Weiss at eleven tomorrow,’ he said to me.

  *

  There was some confusion at the car, which Felicia tried to sort out, unsuccessfully. They were picking somebody up somewhere.

  ‘He can walk Marta back to the Lunenfeld-Kunin.’

  ‘Why should they walk back when we’re going that way?’ Michael said.

  Marta had got in the back during this. ‘So perhaps we will meet again,’ she said to me brightly, winding down the window, ‘during your stay?’

  ‘That would be lovely. We must do it.’

  Good nights rang out cheerily. I walked back to the San Martin.

  Caroline hadn’t rung back.

  Next day I got the lot.

  3

  One of the stranger aspects of the discussion with Weiss was that he later supplied me with a transcript of it. I hadn’t noticed a tape recorder in the room, and there’d been no one else there. He’d suffered a lot, of course, from misrepresentation, had Weiss, and I suppose old habits die hard.

  I’d seen photos of him as a young man, Weizmann’s young man, confident, febrile, brilliant, with a certain impatient pazazz to him. The pale triangular face was wasted now; fires banked. It had taken time to find him. Unlike Rehovot, which as a research institute had only a few graduate students, Jerusalem’s was a great teaching university, and most of its undergraduates were still in the Army. The huge stony campus seemed empty, just a few people drifting in and out of the buildings. But I’d followed my nose, and smelled the unsettling smells, and found people drifting aimlessly about the chemistry department, too, and at length found his office.

  Weiss had spent much of his life in Bergmann’s shadow, had been involved in the tremendous conflicts that had broken out in the late 1940s between the President and Bergmann, until then the heir apparent at Rehovot.

  The subject of the conflicts was enshrined in a correspondence, not for publication, and under most severe restraint, anyway. I’d had a good look at it, of course, before coming to see him. I wondered if he knew of the existence of this correspondence, and after one look decided that he did, and moreover that he very likely knew of the existence of everything.

  He was a small, hunched, elegant composition in grays and blacks, and he looked at me most suspiciously as he shook my hand and seated me. But in a couple of minutes he’d crisply put into perspective all of Finster’s plodding science.

  Yes, it’s finished, kaput, the world of cheap energy, of cheap everything. Very good. We can make a better world, stabler. The importance isn’t the power. There’ll be nuclear power, perhaps other kinds. The importance is the chemicals. Almost everything comes now from the petrochemical industry – our food, medicine, clothing, a hundred things – which is insane. Overnight we see the world held to ransom and prices quadruple. Why should we put up with it?

  I’d tried to stem the tide, but it had rolled on.

  We have to stop living on our capital. This is what we are doing. The oil, the coal – it’s capital. We have to live on our income, because nature every year is making inexhaustible supplies of the same substance. Technologically we are still at the stage of hunting-man. We hunt for the energy when we should be breeding it. You ask why we don’t?

  I hadn’t. I’d said, ‘Very clear, most lucid, Professor. But with regard to Vava –’

  Because always the oil companies oppose us. The thing to understand is that a viable fermentation process would shift influence from the oil belts of the world to the starch belts – a factor of huge significance. The requirements are of climate only, not geological accident. Further, an incalculable gain, you solve the world’s food problem. All the infrastructure, the irrigation, has to go in first. Today, half Africa can drop dead, and the world will give sympathy. Let them keep it! Africa will feed itself – and all of us. You ask where the capital is to come from?

  I’d asked nothing at all. The brilliant young man with the pazazz was staring uncannily at me through the wasted face.

  I can tell you. For anything offering the same convenience of processing as oil – which coal and shale do not – gigantic sums are available. Those in at the birth of the petrochemical industry know this. So many things had to happen together there, so many discoveries, with simply massive industrial development. Compared with that, this is child’s play. All the development has been done. It’s simply a matter of replacing your source material. Instead of getting it from a hole in the ground or the sea, you grow it. At a time of cheap oil there was no incentive. But now? All that stops us is a technicality. The established processes of fermentation are too slow and the yield too low. What another investigator has found, however –

  (‘Vava?’ I’d said. And he had acknowledged with a wintry smile: ‘Vava.’)

  What another investigator has found is that existing yields from fermentation may perhaps be doubled, and the time halved, by working with a particular strain of bacterium on certain materials. However, at the present time we have no knowledge of his bacterium or his materials. This briefly is the background to the problem.

  Well, we’d got to it, and I briefly celebrated, and said, ‘As you know, Professor, all I can do is concentrate on Vava. What can you tell me about him?’

  ‘Professor Bergmann, I think, has already told you.’ The scientific ice pack now broken, the wintry sun was more in evidence. ‘He was simply a
colleague of ours in London, in 1933·’

  ‘He worked at the Featherstone Laboratory?’

  ‘He hardly worked there. He popped in and out. What do you know of the Featherstone Laboratory?’ The smile was now quite mellow.

  ‘An address on a letter-heading.’

  ‘The Featherstone Laboratory – it was like something from Dickens. We had there – Weizmann had rented – as I remember, the second and fourth floors. Somebody else was on the first and the third. All day we ran up and down the stairs. It was something unbelievable. It was in a tiny side street off Holborn. The place doesn’t exist any more. I made once a sentimental journey to have a look. Nothing. It was bombed out of existence early in the war. All the day, up and down we ran. A very dark staircase. It corresponded to none of the safety conditions written into the law for such premises. Yet we did some work there.’

  They certainly had. They had done much of the basic work on which the petrochemical industry, which he was now lamenting, rested: petroleum-cracking, aromatics analysis. I mentioned the fact.

  ‘I see you have read something of this. Yes, we made certain investigations which entered the literature. Shell took over the processes. Old history,’ he said. He was now smiling most genially.

  ‘Not a very elaborate laboratory, I believe.’

  ‘Elaborate?’ I saw all his teeth. ‘No. You may say so. We had no spectroscope or physical apparatus. However, there were friends in various quarters. What was required was available. Yes, we did some work in the Featherstone Laboratory.’

  ‘And Vava helped.’