A Technologo-Scientific and Popular Cultural Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1953, II: Soylent Green is Etc!

 

I'm sure everyone has seen 1973's "Soylent Green is People" clip, and the opening credits are actually pretty fun. And a good reminder that Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, came out in the same era as John Brunner's Dos Passos-inspired pseudo-found novels beginning with 1968's overpopulation-centred Stand on Zanzibar. I'm not sure how the movie money came to be left on the table for Harrison. but he did have the good sense to write a police procedural instead of a quadrology of sprawling, experimental novels. Harrison was, if anything, too succinct for his own good, hence Deathworld not being Dune. 

Blue green algae might also be too succinct for its own good. It's small, and short-lived; There have been a million generations since blue-green algae started out being the next big thing in fighting overpopulation and the "limits to growth," and as far as I can tell, we're still waiting. But, then, that's the point of the movie, isn't it? "Soylent" is the food of the future; Blue-green algae would should have been the food of the future,  but it turns out that there's a problem. 

I know, I know, that's a link to a weird and poorly reviewed science fiction novel from the early Seventies. The Ballentine second hands are everywhere, so I suspect it sold well but was received coldly, and I can see why, because it is a strange, if epic, story. And it happens to be the place where the  idea of the empty oceans was introduced to me --along with a lot of other very weird stuff.  T. J. Bass probably deserves some kind of attention, and the idea of a dead ocean was definitely resonating in the early 1970s, replacing earlier optimism about the bounteous harvest to come of "Fish and plankton, sea greens and protein from the sea." Protein. It's always protein. And cannibalism. Yum!

Cyanobacteria are a simple, single-celled lifeform growing in a water medium. They photosynthesise, form bacterial colonies consisting of algae mats, and have some capacity to either fix nitrogen obligatorily or shift to nitrogen fixation in anaerobic environments. Unlike the hardy and universal life of the dreams of the Forties, and more like the nightmarishly fragile Nature of the 1970s, cyanobacteria have difficulty coping with open ocean environments and excessive light, especially ultraviolet. More modern visions of their past place them at the centre of the first global biogenic catastrophe, the Great Oxidation Event of 2.5 billion years BP. 

We are not, however, here to read about "blue green algae" in the modern vision of a lifeform complicit in ecocide on the one hand, perhaps a convenient source of biodiesel on the other, and otherwise best known as a dietary supplement. To the visionaries Eric Hodgins visits in the fall of 1953, it is also the most plausible way of exploiting solar energy. Six months from cover date, on 25 April 1954, Bell Labs would demonstrate a photoelectric silicon cell with 6% efficiency, enough to power a toy Ferris wheel in their demonstration. (Interestingly, it uses silicon at a time when transistors are still being made exclusively from germanium.)

It is actually a bit appalling just how obscure all of this is.  Charles Kettering ("Ketteridge" in the blog post)  is a well known figure in the automotive community, but his experiments with solar power and blue green algae are forgotten. In running down early scientific literature, I came across "J. S. Burlew" as the co-author of multiple papers, as well, as interestingly enough, one on the cryogenic dewar used to transport the cryogenic first hydrogen bomb. (Although the article doesn't mention this top-secret connection.) Do you think I could find out who Burlew was? No! (Well, he's "John S. Burlew," which leads me to archival fonds of his correspondence with Linus Pauling and others, but no collection of his papers.) I only hope that he was related to Rich Burlew, so that this link to the Order of the Stick isn't completely off-topic. The Wikipedia article gets us started down the road to thinking of blue green algae as food for an overpopulated world: apparently assorted anthropologists of the 1930s. A French researcher, publishing in 1940, when you would think it might be at risk of being overlooked, found it in use as a food in the Lake Chad basin, and in historical references to its harvesting from the lakes of the Valley of Mexico in Pre-Columbian times, but it seems as though there were skeptics.

The Carnegie Institute apparently arrived at blue green algae via the wartime search for new antibiotics. Following up with this source, an introduction to the edited volume by Vannevar Bush, of all people, we learn that it was first investigated as a food source in the winter of 1947--8, a time when, we'll recall, the idea of biodiesel must have seemed particularly ridiculous with famine incipient in so much of the world. The Carnegie Institute dropped blue-green algae research in 1950, when it was taken up by some universities, and by the Arthur D. Little company, which might be how Burlew got involved. The need for a new, high-protein food source seemed obvious to those worthies, although in fact blue green algae is no richer in proteins than any number of foods, and in general the obsession with protein in the old days, which also gets you to soylent, makes one a bit queasy these days since it turns out that, overpopulated as the Earth might be, it can still produce a lot of meat. 

Now that's an overpopulated Earth! Unfortunately for the fans, apart from the algae blooms and the fragility of algae mat colonies, eating blue green algae turns out to not be the perfect culinary experience:

"Human feeding of algae was studied in volunteers by adding algae as a supplement to the diet in amounts varying from 10 to 500 gm per man per day. Although the bitter, strong, spinach-like flavor predominated in all foods supplemented with algae, the most acceptable preparations were cookies, chocolate cake, gingerbread, and cold milk. Amounts up to 100 gm per man daily were tolerated by all.

When larger amounts were added, gastrointestinal symptoms were more prominent. These included nausea, vomiting, abdominal distention, flatulence, lower abdominal cramping pains, and bulky hard stools. No other evidence of toxicity was found and the gastrointestinal symptoms disappeared shortly after the algae was discontinued. It was concluded that algae in this form (heat treated, dried algae) can be tolerated as a food supplement but further processing will be necessary if algae it to be useful as a major food source. Methods to improve both acceptability and digestibility are needed."

Yum! Again! When you notice algae coming to the fore beside talk about birth control in India, I have to wonder to what extent it is a conflated metaphor: Too many brown people are kind of like a giant mat of algae in bloom. So I guess it makes sense that we end up eating people, and not the algae harvested from the dead seas. 

But I'm sure that this time around, blue green algae will definitely save the world by producing enough biodiesel to keep the aviation sector going just like it is today. Have I made a snarky comment about  the 737 Max recently?