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Profit Motive as a Source of Unhappiness DEAR SIR:
Your editorial in the Oct. 25 magazine tried to take a look at the profit motive as a source of unhappiness among researchers.
I would like to add that using the idea of profit to motivate people in an organization has been proved poor over and over again. It is difficult to articulate objectives through the framework of profits; profits are hard to convert to anything which a group of people can act on. Even as a generalized objective, the improvement of humanity is better understood by most people—technical and nontechnical.
And even if there were no profits at all, the objective of an organization in business would still generally be the same; to produce goods or services which have real benefit to a broad group of people.
In our society and in our system of government, profits are necessary to life but neither water nor food is our motivation today, and so with profits and private enterprise. To use profits to explain either unhappiness or happiness is a somewhat shallow approach to today's problems, and is likely to leave researchers and we "non-scholars" alike unimpressed.
R. M. BERRY
Rye, NY.
Industry vs. Society— Call for Rebuttal DEAR SIR:
The article by Dr. Castle in C&EN for Oct. 11 is quite pungent, but it leaves me slightly dazed. Dr. Castle says: "As some people in the chemical industry blame the container industry for beer cans that clutter the highways, I blame the chemical industry for the chemical trash that clutters the air we breathe. If the chemical industry does not befoul the atmosphere, the industry at least appears to me to be expert in the elements which do."
Blaming the container industry for beer cans along the highways seems something like blaming the match industry for fires set by arsonists.
Dr. Castle says he has seen goats
killed by an organic phosphate and is hence worried about peaches eaten by his family, so that he has recurring nightmares. There is a fairly voluminous literature in this field that deserves Dr. Castle's attention. Accidents occasionally take place with organic phosphate insecticides on farms, but instability keeps any residues of these compounds from reaching the meal table in significant quantities.
The part played by the chemical industry in society is surely "something more than uninspired economic contribution." The inroads made by chemistry against hunger and disease have undoubtedly played a major part in the population explosion, which results in an increased consumption of petroleum and other "effluent-generating" products, which results in a greater environmental pollution.
I agree with Dr. Castle's prescribed course of action, but I think that at least some of the accusations in the three categories he lists, made against the chemical industry during the past few years, call for rebuttal rather than providing a basis for acts of vengeance by society against the industry. Also, let's not tell people to blame the container industry each time they heave a beer can out of a car window.
THOMAS H. JUKES
Berkeley, Calif.
A Point of Safety on Magnesium Perchlorate DEAR SIR:
I would like to raise a point of safety concerning the use of magnesium perchlorate as a desiccant inside a drybag as described in 'Techniques of Inorganic Chemistry," Vol. Il l , edited by Jonassen and Weissberger, page 316.
I feel that the use of this material as a desiccant where there is any possibility of contamination by organic materials to be very dangerous. Several instances of explosions from this type of usage have been documented (C&EN, Sept. 13, page 62) . I have mentioned this to the publishers concerned and they have agreed to insert a warning note in subsequent volumes.
R. J. HODSON
Lancashire, England \
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NOV. 2 2, 1965 C & E N 5
