Science: Good Mixers

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> In dry cleaning, where they increase the power of solvents, and in laundering, where they sometimes replace soap.

Compared with soap, wetting agents have three advantages: they will work 1) in the presence of acids, 2) in hard water, 3) in cold water. Many a U.S. woman has long been washing her clothes, hair and teeth with these soapless soaps—e.g., Procter & Gamble's "Dreft," "Drene," etc., and Colgate's similar line, whose unusual chemistry has not been emphasized in their makers' advertising. Chemists are trying to put a soapless detergent into cake form. When they succeed, as they may any day now, its advantages—notably in the vast U.S. hard-water zones—will revolutionize the soap industry.

Least known are the medical uses of wetting agents, first revealed in 1935 by Germany's Gerhard Domagk, who was awarded but could not accept a Nobel Prize (1939) for his work with prontosil (forerunner of sulfanilamide). In 1939 Dr. Benjamin Frank Miller of the University of Chicago was looking for an agent which would carry germicides into every nook & cranny of the teeth. Paging through LIFE one day, he ran across a picture of American Cyanamid's famous ducks being scuttled with its "Aerosol" wetting agent. Miller tried the same product on teeth, found that it penetrated everywhere with a germicide. Then he discovered that synthetic wetting agents themselves were also powerful germicides.

Theory is that the detergent attacks the bacteria's protective coats, leaves them naked and dead. Several top-notch medical researchers are now exploring the uses of wetting agents. So far suggested: in obstetrics, preoperative disinfection of skin and instruments in surgery, cleansing of superficial wounds, throat swabs, athlete's foot. Some detergents will inactivate the influenza virus.

But for all their successes, the devisers and producers of wetting agents last week took most pleasure in reflecting that they were scarcely out of the pioneering stage, that the future would probably bring still more remarkable advances.