OCR Text |
Show Vital Food Elements Made in Laboratory The five food factors are salts, fats, carbohydrates, proteins and vitamines. Theoretically speaking, the first three j i of these can already be made in a laboratory. lab-oratory. The fourth seems possible, and chemists are optimistic about the fifth, says Floyd W. Parsons, in the Saturday Evening Post. The important impor-tant question does not so much concern con-cern our ability to make these vital food elements, but rather can we manufacture man-ufacture the essential constituents of our daily diet as cheaply as plants can make them. The French scientist, Berthelot, has produced foodstuffs artificially In a laboratory by subjecting gases to the action of ultra-violet rays. He proceeds pro-ceeds on the idea that it is the light of the sun rather than its heat that produces growth in plants. In the growth of animals, the foodstuffs consumed con-sumed are reduced to carbonic acid and water vapor, but in the case of plants the action is just the reverse. The plant takes the two gases exhaled ex-haled by animals and combines them again to form the sugars and other hydrocarbons that animals feed upon. Berthelot's work tends to discredit the notion that the ' synthetic functioning func-tioning of plants is a vital action,- the secret of which is looked upon in that profound puzzle concerning the creation cre-ation of life itself. |