Word: bayer
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Copper Blue Blood. While Professor Ernst Bayer of Tubingen University was still a graduate student, he began to study the ability of marine animals to concentrate some of the rare metals found in sea water. The sea squirt, Phallusia mamillata, for example, has 1,000,000 times more vanadium in its blood than the water it lives in; the deep blue blood of the octopus has 100,000 times as much copper. If sea squirts and octopuses can do the trick, asked Bayer, why shouldn't human chemists...
From octopus blood he extracted hemocyanin, a protein that picks up copper because its molecule has a structure that a copper ion fits into neatly, like a key into a lock. But proteins are hard to handle and almost impossible to synthesize, so Bayer looked for simpler compounds that would do the same job. After many tries, he put together a black granular material that picks up copper and uranium only. When this "chelating agent" worked well in the laboratory with simulated sea water, Bayer took it to Naples, put it in a glass column and ran 100 liters...
...achievement was impressive, but Bayer had his eye on the much more difficult feat of capturing the ocean's gold. He concocted another chelating agent with an appetite for gold and went back once more to Naples. There he put a pinch of the new compound in 100 liters of sea water and shook the mixture mechanically for twelve hours. Then he filtered out the chelating agent and washed it with acid. The result: 1.4 micrograms of gold (.000000049 oz.), the exact amount in 100 liters of Naples sea water...
...trustbusters moved to dismember a joint chemical subsidiary set up in Pittsburgh by Monsanto Co. and West Germany's Farbenfabriken Bayer, also filed a suit to prevent Manhattan-based Allied Chemical from absorbing General Foam Corp. But their choice target was Humble Oil, Jersey Standard's U.S. operating and marketing subsidiary. Humble planned to spend $329 million to acquire the Western operations of Tidewater Oil Co., which is owned by Jean Paul Getty, the richest living American (approximate wealth: $1 billion), and run by his son, George Getty II. The takeover would bring Humble one refinery, five supertankers...
There it stayed until the 1890s, when Felix Hoffmann, working for Friedrich Bayer & Co. outside Düsseldorf, tried the drug on his father and found that it miraculously eased the old man's rheumatic pains. Hoffmann's boss, Heinrich Dreser, coined the name aspirin, and rushed the drug to market. Aspirin was a registered trade name, and still is in Germany, though it lost that privileged status in the U.S. in 1917, when the Monsanto Co. began to make it in large quantities. Like nearly all other important chemicals, it is now made synthetically from coal...