Old Trapper
Verified User
Watched this on 60 Minutes last night, and it is truly remarkable what this amateur scientist has accomplished:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marsha...ing-inedible-plant-life-into-fuel-60-minutes/
ut while engineers, geologists and ecologists with Ph.D.s went to labs at MIT and Stanford, Medoff went to one of the country's most legendary settings for reflection.
Marshall Medoff: I used to run out to-- Walden, which wasn't that far away.
Lesley Stahl: You mean Walden Pond?
Marshall Medoff: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: Thoreau?
Marshall Medoff: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: Okay.
Marshall Medoff: What I thought was, the reason people were failing is they were trying to overcome nature instead of working with it.
He knew that there's a lot of energy in plant life. It's in the form of sugar molecules that once accessed can be converted into transportation fuel. The key word is "access." This sugar is nearly impossible to extract cheaply and cleanly since it is locked tightly inside the plant's cellulose, the main part of a plant's cellular walls. What's so tantalizing is that sugar-rich cellulose is the most abundant biological material on earth.
Marshall Medoff: Cellulose is everywhere. I mean, there's just so much cellulose in the world and nobody had managed to use any of it. Couldn't get at it.
Lesley Stahl: So that was your target.
Marshall Medoff: That was my target. So, once I decided to do that, I said, "Wow, if I can break through this, we can increase the resources of the world maybe by a third or more." Who knows?
To figure out how to break through cellulose to get at the sugars, Marshall Medoff did something that most of us wouldn't dream of: he buried himself away in seclusion for more than 15 years in a garage at a storage facility in the middle of nowhere.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marsha...ing-inedible-plant-life-into-fuel-60-minutes/
ut while engineers, geologists and ecologists with Ph.D.s went to labs at MIT and Stanford, Medoff went to one of the country's most legendary settings for reflection.
Marshall Medoff: I used to run out to-- Walden, which wasn't that far away.
Lesley Stahl: You mean Walden Pond?
Marshall Medoff: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: Thoreau?
Marshall Medoff: Yeah.
Lesley Stahl: Okay.
Marshall Medoff: What I thought was, the reason people were failing is they were trying to overcome nature instead of working with it.
He knew that there's a lot of energy in plant life. It's in the form of sugar molecules that once accessed can be converted into transportation fuel. The key word is "access." This sugar is nearly impossible to extract cheaply and cleanly since it is locked tightly inside the plant's cellulose, the main part of a plant's cellular walls. What's so tantalizing is that sugar-rich cellulose is the most abundant biological material on earth.
Marshall Medoff: Cellulose is everywhere. I mean, there's just so much cellulose in the world and nobody had managed to use any of it. Couldn't get at it.
Lesley Stahl: So that was your target.
Marshall Medoff: That was my target. So, once I decided to do that, I said, "Wow, if I can break through this, we can increase the resources of the world maybe by a third or more." Who knows?
To figure out how to break through cellulose to get at the sugars, Marshall Medoff did something that most of us wouldn't dream of: he buried himself away in seclusion for more than 15 years in a garage at a storage facility in the middle of nowhere.