Credit:
Courtesy of Patrick Dunne
I want to follow up on the short business note in the April print issue of C&EN on the closure of chemical plants in the isolated desert community of Trona, California. Trona is a double salt of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate and a key component of the salt body of the dry Searles Lake. Because of the German monopoly on potash, Searles Lake was set aside as a government potash reserve in 1913, with royalties to be paid for chemicals extracted from the brine. I grew up in the small village of Westend, by the West End Chemical plant. This was a family business owned by F. M. “Borax” Smith. My father came there in 1925 to run the business office, coming from the West End silver mine, in Tonopah, Nevada, which bankrolled Smith’s borax venture. We went to school and shopped in the bigger town of Trona, 5 miles (8 km) away. I had a small lab on our back porch and supplemented my Porter Chemical Chemcraft Chemistry Lab kit with chemicals borrowed from the lab in the plant. I graduated from Trona High School in 1960, and my older brother, Tom, graduated in 1948. Both of us are 50-year members of the American Chemical Society. Tom was a long-time professor of chemistry at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
This is more of a story of the influence of the town, rather than any individual, on my career. Trona schools benefited from funding from a portion of the potash royalties and had excellent teachers in my era. In high school, I did a science fair project, working with a group from American Potash and Chemical, doing a core drilling at Searles Lake, and we made a model of the complex of the two salt layers separated by a mud layer, which contained some unique minerals, plus borax, potassium chloride, and sodium chloride, as well as trona crystals. I went on to college as a chemistry major at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Riverside (UCR). I took a biology course at UCR, and it sparked interest in biochemistry, so I went in 1964 to graduate school at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where I did research on organometallic chemistry of vitamin B12 for my PhD thesis. I then took an academic track with a postdoc in enzymology at Michigan State University and faculty positions at the University of Detroit and California State University, Long Beach, where I became interested in food chemistry while teaching a nutritional biochemistry course. I went to an ACS meeting in Anaheim, California, that led to a career change when I went to a symposium talk on food irradiation, by Irwin A. Taub of the US Natick Laboratory Army Research, Development, and Engineering Center.
