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Little Perfex Co. of Shenandoah, Iowa, had a big idea. Perfex wanted a synthetic starch that would come bottled, ready for use, and make starching as simple as washing. Since Perfex had no research staff, it laid the problem in the lap of Kansas City's Midwest Research Institute. Six weeks later, Midwest's chemists came up with "Gloss Tex." Perfex is now busy shipping hundreds of barrels of this new synthetic starch.

Prosperity Planner. It was to do such jobs for small businessmen and farmers that Midwest Institute was formed three years ago at the suggestion of Kansas City Planner J. C. Nichols (TIME, Dec. 1). He thought the wheat bowl's agricultural production was not enough to sustain its precarious prosperity. What it needed was industry.

Nichols raised $500,000 from merchants, manufacturers and civic leaders, started with an abandoned firehouse, later bought five buildings and a 160-acre experimental lot. Harold Vagtborg was hired away from the Armour Research Foundation to head Midwest, and his staff of physicists, chemists, engineers soon had a list of impressive achievements.

An engineer who had reduced the flutter of airplane surfaces found a way to do the same for plow blades. A geologist worked out a method of handling ammonium nitrate crystals which helped the Spencer Chemical Co. of Pittsburg, Kans. switch from wartime explosives to peacetime fertilizers. Midwest developed a bacteriological germicide, a new kind of steak sauce, a mud hardener for barnyards, and a revolutionary way to mill wheat by exploding grains with compressed air.

Industry Creator. Midwest's success in projects for small companies brought commissions from big ones. Standard Oil Co. (Indiana) asked the institute to work on new uses for petroleum byproducts; the U.S. Government hired it to make a survey of the industrial potential of the Missouri Valley.

This week, Midwest celebrates its third anniversary with a 1948 prospect of a new $1,000,000 laboratory building and a $600,000 appropriation for research. Most of this will be spent in developing agricultural products that might create new industries. The Institute's work on sorghum as a source for dextrose and starches has already paid that kind of a dividend. Its new processes will help Corn Products Refining Co. refine some 6,000,000 bushels of sorghum a year in a projected $16,000,000 plant at Corpus Christi, Tex.

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