USEFUL MICROBES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23993, 17 June 1941, Page 8

USEFUL MICROBES

THEIR PART IN INDUSTRY ACTIVITIES OF YEAST Many of the ways in which microbes have been utilised for the service of man in recent years were reviewed in an address given to the Rotary Club yesterday by Mr. G Frieberg, manag-ing-director of Dominion Compressed Yeast Company, Limited. "What has already taken place," he said, ''indicates clearly that industrial microbiology is a growing branch < f science and an interesting one." Mr. Frieberg recalled that it was about 1850 that yeast was proved to be a living plant, and to be the probable cause, rather than the result, of the fermentation of beer and wine. It remained for the experiments of Helmholtz and especially the epoch-making work of Louis Pasteur to explain these phenomena. Pasteur's persistent and laborious investigations concerning micro-organisms not only twice saved France from financial ruin, but greatly advanced wine, beer and other fermentations and undoubtedly preserved the silk industry of the world. From the study of the silkworm disease came the foundation of the whole structure of preventive medicine. It was not always realised that yeast, which was present to the extent of some 61.000.000,000 million living cells in a one-inch cube of compressed yeast, was but one of the many scores of species of micro-organisms with wide distribution in nature. Many of these were of much industrial importance. Mr. Frieberg referred to the part played by certain types of veast in the production of power alcohol, its wartime use as a source of fat, and its importance in the production of glycerine and of synthetic rubber, and of acetone and butyl alcohol. He said the world was apparently at the beginning of an era of micro-biological development that might be of vast interest.