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We allowed ourselves to become particularly interested in research into the appearance of intermediate products of sugar decomposition during cell-free fermentation.

In the course of the 1920s and 1930s, great progress was made in the study of the intermediary reactions by which sugar is anaerobically fermented to lactic acid or to ethanol and carbon dioxide.

Sugar crystallizes something in our American soul. It is emblematic of all industrial processes. And of the idea of becoming white. White being equated with pure and 'true': it takes a lot of energy to turn brown things into white things. A lot of pressure.

Soon afterwards I studied the inversion of sugar in the light of these considerations and immediately found that this classical reaction, too, was determined quantitatively by the same property of the acids, as was of course to be expected from the previous results.

If you have acid in food, you need to sugar it. At a high temperature, the acids are changed to sugar.

The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler.

Sugar is the new tobacco.

By combining chemical, biochemical and physical techniques, it has thus become possible to investigate the nature of enzymic catalysis in a novel manner, complementary to the other approaches which have developed over the same period.

We can track and see the production of single molecules, trace them and see how they assemble into structures.