THAT’S THE WAY THE COOKIE CRUMBLES Read Online Free PDF

sulfonamides, simply because no one had done this before. Fahlberg, it seems, was a pretty sloppy chemist — he often didn’t bother to wash his hands before leaving the laboratory. His sloppiness, though, turned into a stroke of luck.
    At dinner one evening, Fahlberg noticed that the slice of bread he had picked up tasted unusually sweet. It didn’t take him long to figure out what had happened. He traced the sweetness to a substance he had been handling in the laboratory, and he immediately brought this chance discovery to the attention of Remsen. In 1880, the two scientists published their finding in
The American Chemical Journal
, noting that the new compound was hundreds of times sweeter than sugar. Remsen looked upon this as a mere curiosity, but Fahlberg immediately saw the potential for commercial exploitation. He knew that sugar prices fluctuated greatly, and that a low-cost sweetening agent would be most welcome. Those on a weight-loss regime, Fahlberg thought, would also find the new product appealing. The product would dramatically lower the calorie count of sugar-sweetened foods, since it was so sweet that only a tiny amount would produce the desired sweetness. Fahlberg coined the term “saccharin” for his discovery, after the Latin word for sugar, and he secretly patented the process for making it. Within a few years, saccharin became the world’s first commercial nonnutritive sweetener, and it made Fahlberg a wealthy man.
    Remsen did not resent the fact that neither he nor Johns Hopkins University ever made a dime from saccharin. He was a pure scientist at heart and did not much care whether his research turned out to be financially profitable. But he did develop an intense dislike for Fahlberg, who, by all accounts, tried to take sole credit for the discovery. “Fahlberg is a scoundrel,” Remsen often said, “and it nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him!” But due to the importance of the saccharin discovery, their names will be forever linked. The importance is twofold: first, the commercial production of saccharin is the earliest example of a technology transfer from university research to the marketplace; second, and more importantly, saccharin introduced the concept of a nonnutritive sweetener, an idea that has been mired in controversy from the moment it was first raised.
    Saccharin went into commercial production in Germany, where Fahlberg had taken out a patent. It wasn’t until 1902 that John Francis Queeny, a former purchasing agent for a drug company in St. Louis, decided to take a chance on manufacturing saccharin in the United States. Here the sweetener was not burdened by any of the legal problems that were arising in Europe. He borrowed fifteen hundred dollars and founded a company that at first had only two employees — himself and his wife. Queeny decided to give the company his wife’s maiden name, and Monsanto was born. At first, the company’s only product was saccharin, but it quickly diversified to become one of the largest chemical companies in the world.
    The unfettered use of saccharin in America did not last long, however — thanks mostly to the work of Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, who, in 1883, was made chief of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry. The bureau had been created to monitor the safety of the food supply when the population began to increase dramatically after the Civil War, resulting in large-scale changes in food production. People were moving into the cities from farms, and they no longer ate every meal at home or prepared every meal from scratch. A burgeoning food industry was gearing up to meet the demand for prepared foods and the preservatives needed to make them safe. Wiley had become concerned about the unregulated use of such food additives, an issue to which he had become sensitized during his days as a professor of chemistry at Purdue University. In 1881, he had published a paper on the adulteration of sugar