Angels calling

In the fall of 1976 I had a call from a friend, Sid Benson, who, after a decade at the Stanford Research Institute, just returned to the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. He invited me for a visit, telling me about USC s plans to build up seleeted programs, ineluding chemistry. I visited USC and found it, with its close to downtown urban campus, quite different from the sprawling expanse of the eross-town eampus of UCLA, whieh I had visited on a number of oe-... 

Petroleum—a natural mineral oil—was referred to as early as the Old Testament. The word petroleum means rock oil [from the Greek petros (rock) and elaion (oil)]. It has been found for centuries seeping out of the ground, for example, in the Los Angeles basin in what are now called the La Brea tar pits. Vast deposits were found in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa. 

For example, George Ellery Hale, James R. Angell, and Robert A. Millikan c ted the productivity of such teams as evidence for the power of cooperation in research, and they called for a similarly coordinated approach to scientific problems in peacetime (1, 2). 

These processes are both natural and manmade. In fact, the Los Angeles basin was called by the early Native American inhabitants the land of the smokes, and salt spray from oceans is a major source of Cl in the atmosphere. In many situations people have only exaggerated the natural chemicals and reactions that were present before we and our technology arrived. The Smoky Mountains are an example of natural smog caused by chemicals such as isoprene (the natural mbber monomer) and terpenes, which are emitted by trees. 

Researchers at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, have developed a technology called the hybrid microfiltration-bioactive carbon (MF-BACP) process, for the ex situ treatment of contaminated groundwater. 

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