Book to Note

Joseph S. Fruton. Fermentation: Vital or Chemical Process? Boston: Brill, 2006. xv + 141 pp. $98.

Reviewed by Christopher P. Munden

Human knowledge of fermentation is at least as old as agriculture; some archeologists have even suggested that alcohol production was the impetus for permanent human settlement. Joseph Fruton considers how this phenomenon has been understood by thinkers from ancient times to the present, giving the study of fermentation a firm footing in the history of chemistry. Alchemists hoped to use fermentation to prepare an elixir that would turn common metals into gold and cure human ailments. Later chemists studied fermentation to expand their knowledge of the natural world, but until relatively recently the process was little understood. Even Louis Pasteur, whose introduction of pure strains of yeast helped transform alcohol production from a craft to a science, saw fermentation as an exclusively biological or “vital” process. A coherent pathway of carbon in alcohol fermentation, involving 12 specific enzymes, was only understood after the development of organic chemical methods.