Three New Sugars

The chemistry of sugars is so abstruse that Dr. Richard Fay Jackson's identification of three new sugars at the U. S. Bureau of Standards last week was a little triumph. He found the new sugars in inulin, a starchlike ingredient of certain roots, in the course of the Bureau's researches to establish an inulin-sugar industry for the U. S. When starch is boiled in water and otherwise suitably treated it breaks down into glucose, or grape sugar.* When inulin is handled similarly, fructose, or fruit sugar, is the chief result.

Dr. Jackson was seeking to measure the fructose content of inulin. He found it to be 92%. Then he wondered what constituted the 8% residue. He easily recognized 3% as glucose. Patient work with chemicals and a polariscope discovered the three new kinds of fruit sugar in the remaining 5%.

Dr. Jackson named them, for other saccharifiers to recognize, d-fructose 1, 2, and 3. Although inulin-derived fruit sugar suitable for household and factory use will soon be sold as cheaply as grape (corn sugar is the same) or cane sugar (a more complex sugar), fruit sugar purified for laboratory research costs $27.22 a pound. Dr. Jackson's three new sugars are not for sale. To produce the small quantities he has, cost at the rate of $50,000 a pound. Laboratory inulin costs $90 a pound. Its natural sources are dandelions, dahlias, goldenrod and. above all, the Jerusalem artichoke.

*Animals" muscles and livers contain an animal starch which breaks down also into plucosc. The glucose supplies energy for work.

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