Academic literature on the topic 'Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Materials Processing Center'

"trichinae in pork (3); the x-ray machines available at that time were not powerful enough to treat pork in commercially interesting quantities. The food laws of many countries apply also to tobacco products and it is perhaps not too farfetched to mention irradiation of a tobacco product in this contest. Cigars can be attacked and badly damaged by the tobacco beetle, Lasioderma serricorne. This used to be a serious problem for the cigar industry. Many shipments of cigars had to be discarded because the product was criss­ crossed by the feeding tunnels of the insect. G. A. Runner of USDA’s Bureau of Entomology had demonstrated in 1916 that eggs, larvae, and the adults of the t obacco beetle could be killed in cigars by x-rays (4). At the request of the American Tobacco Company, an x-ray machine with a conveyor system for the irradiation of boxes of cigars was built by American Machine and Foundry Company in New York City and put into operation in 1929. A water-cooled x-ray tube with a maximal power of 30 mA at 200 kV was the radiation source.* Although the treatment effectively prevented damage to the cigars, the machine turned out to be unsuitable for continuous use. Details can no longer be re­ constructed, but it appears that the x-ray tubes then available were built for intermittent use in medical diagnosis and therapy, not for continuous use on a production line. At any rate, chemical fumigation later replaced this first indus­ trial application of radiation processing. A French patent was granted in 1930 to O. Wiist for an invention described by the words (in translation): “ Foods of all kinds which are packed in sealed metallic containers are submitted to the action of hard (high-voltage) x-rays to kill all bacteria” (5). However, the patent never led to a practical application. New interest was stimulated in 1947 by a publication ( ) of two expatriate German scientists, Amo Brasch and Wolfgang Huber, coinventors of a pulsed electron accelerator, the Capacitron, and founders of Electronized Chemicals Corporation in Brooklyn, New York. They reported that meats and some other foodstuffs could be sterilized by high-energy electron pulses; that some food­ stuffs, particularly milk and other dairy products, were susceptible to radiation and developed off-flavors; and that these undesirable radiation effects could be avoided by irradiation in the absence of oxygen and at low temperatures. With regard to cost efficiency they concluded that irradiation “ will not materially increase the final price of the treated product.” At about the same time, J. G. Trump and R. J. van de Graaff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had developed another type of electron accelerator, also studied effects of irradia­ tion on foods and other biological materials (7). They collaborated in these studies with MIT’s Department of Food Technology. The foundations of food irradiation research had been laid when B. E. Proctor and S. A. Goldblith reviewed these." In Safety of Irradiated Foods. CRC Press, 1995. http://dx.doi.org/10.1201/9781482273168-14.