IN THE LABORATORY

ABOVE is a drawing of the Southern Regional Research Laboratory at New Orleans. Inside and outside it is much like the other three regional laboratories of the Department of Agriculture.

On the next pages are shown a few of the everyday activities in laboratories.

Seeing and measuring are a large part of science. For that, a scientist may use an ordinary microscope that magnifies an object up to 500 times. Or he may use this electron microscope, which has a useful magnification up to 100,000 times and can make the dot at the end of this line appear to be 300 feet in diameter.

RADIOACTIVE CHEMICALS furnish valuable new tools in agricultural research. Two examples of their use: They can be used as tracers to follow the movement of ordinary chemicals through plants or animals to learn what happens to them. Added to dried egg, radioactive glucose shows how glucose operates to hasten spoilage. George W. Irving, Jr., of the Bureau of Agricultural and Industrial Chemistry, protected by rubber gloves, long-handled instruments, and a lead shield, against harmful radiations, here transfers to a synthesizing apparatus a small amount of a radioactive iodine solution from a lead-shielded shipping bottle.