About Her Life

Allene Rosaline Jeanes (1906–1995) was a native of Waco, Texas. She stayed in Waco for college, earning a bachelor's degree from Baylor University, before heading west to earn a master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at Alabama's Athens College for five years before returning to school at the University of Illinois, where she earned her Ph.D.

With her doctorate in hand, Jeanes went to work for the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C. After a few years she moved to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Northern Regional Research Lab (NRRL) in Peoria, Illinois. There she worked on polysaccharides (giant molecules made of thousands of sugar molecules). Starch is a polysaccharide that is found in wheat, corn, rice, and potatoes. Cellulose is also a polysaccharide, and it's found in cotton, wood, and paper.

Jeanes soon became interested in a polysaccharide called dextran. Dextran was hard to find in nature, at least in large quantities, which made her research difficult. But she lucked out when a puzzled soft drink company in Peoria sent a bottle of viscous, gooey root beer to NRRL to see if the scientists could figure out what had gone wrong. It turned out that the root beer had been contaminated with a kind of bacteria that just happened to produce dextran, and the dextran was thickening the root beer. The bacteria were just what Jeanes needed. The bacteria were isolated, and Jeanes used them to make all the dextran she needed.

In the meantime, some researchers in Sweden and in England were tossing around the idea that dextran might be a good blood plasma extender. A blood plasma extender is used to keep a person who has lost a lot of blood alive until a blood transfusion can be performed. A plasma extender can't carry oxygen to the cells like real blood can, but it can, in situations like wartime or car accidents, keep a person alive long enough to get to a hospital for a transfusion. Jeanes and her colleagues were considering this potential use of dextran when, in 1950, the Korean War erupted and the United States soon became involved. Jeanes and her colleagues quickly went to work and in a short time they succeeded in making a successful dextran-based blood plasma extender. The new product was rushed into use by army doctors, nurses, and medics. After the war ended, civilian doctors began to use it.

Another important discovery made by Jeanes and her team was xanthan gum, also a polysaccharide. Xanthan gum is great for thickening ice cream and other foods. It is also useful for keeping foods, like oil and vinegar, from separating. If you shake a bottle of Italian dressing, the oil and vinegar will appear to mix, but the oil doesn't truly dissolve. In time, the two substances will separate again. But with xanthan gum added, the oil and vinegar will at least stay together long enough to get from bottle to plate. Xanthan gum is found in everyday products from ketchup and steak sauces to cough syrups and skin lotions.

Jeanes spent her career with the Department of Agriculture at NRRL until her retirement in 1976. She died in 1995 at the age of 89.