3. Hans Becomes a Bread Merchant

Breuer paced the room in agitation. Wanting to appease the correspondent, he decided to grant his request. And he began to speak, as if in front of an audience, involuntarily inspired, and the correspondent, opening a notebook and taking out a pen, wrote down the professor’s speech in shorthand.

“As you probably know, the idea of ​​creating ‘artificial bread’ in the laboratory has long occupied scientists. But they all missed the mark, trying to solve the problem solely by the forces of chemistry alone.

Chemistry is a great science and a great power, but every science has its limits. Even if chemists succeeded, say, in obtaining protein by chemical means, and sooner or later this, of course, will be achieved, the problem of nutrition will not yet be solved. The first question is practical. Scientists managed to obtain gold by chemical techniques, to fulfill the dream of the ancient alchemists about the transformation of base metals into noble ones. But the cost of extracting a gram of gold in the laboratory is much higher than the market value of the same gram of ordinary gold. Scientifically it is a great discovery, but practically it’s useless. The second question is that our nutrition requires not only proteins but also carbohydrates and fats. To create everything necessary for the nutrition of the body by chemical means is a solvable, but also an extremely difficult problem in the current state of our sciences. And I decided to call on biology to help. A living organism is basically a laboratory where the most amazing chemical processes take place, but a laboratory that does not require the participation of human hands. And many decades ago I began to work on the culture of the simplest organisms, trying to grow such a ‘breed’ of a living creature that would contain all the elements necessary for nutrition. I accomplished this task exactly twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years! And you kept silent about it?” exclaimed the reporter in surprise.

“Yes, I did, because this solved only half the problem. My protozoa were an excellent meal. As unicellular organisms, they reproduced by simple division and in this sense also were kind of an ‘eternal bread.’ But to maintain their ‘eternal’ existence, they needed a lot of care, they needed special nutrition. And it was no cheaper than raising, say, pigs. In a word, my laboratory gold cost more than ordinary gold. And I have devoted the last twenty years to finding such a culture of protozoa that would not require any care or expenses for ‘feeding’.”

“And did you succeed?”

“I did indeed. But, I repeat, the experiments are not finished. That is why I implore you to wait a bit with publication. I have found and brought out by artificial selection such a ‘breed’ of the simplest unicellular organisms, which extract everything they need for nutrition directly from the air.”

“Out of thin air?!” again the young man could not help exclaiming. “But what nourishment can the air give? Air is only made up of nitrogen and oxygen…”

“And argon, and hydrogen,” continued the professor, “and neon, and krypton, and helium, and xenon. But besides these permanent elements, the atmosphere also contains variable amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide, nitric acid, ozone, chlorine, ammonia, bromine, hydrogen peroxide, iodine, hydrogen sulfide, sodium chloride, an emanation of radioactive elements radium, thorium, and actinium, then inorganic and, mind you, organic dust, bacteria. And this is ‘meat,’ if you will. Isn’t that a pretty kitchen?”