270 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS GORDON R. MOLESWORTH (Molesworth Associates, New York 16, N.Y.) My presence here today would be a little bit out of place, were it not that the products you fine gentlemen develop have to be sold. In the first place, I think your industry along with others has been very slow to adopt these remarkable techniques and materials in the research and development of new products. But what perhaps is more critical is the fact that in the cases where you have used radioactive isotopes to develop new and better cosmetic products you have not taken a.dvantage of the opportunity that such use gives you to help your company sell them in large volume. Why? Well, there are several reasons. In the first place, I think probably your company public relations people and those in your agencies frankly "don't know a neutron from a hole in the ground." And certainly there are many, many pitfalls in trying to show the public how you have used atomic energy in developing a product for sale if you do not know what an isotope is. Other industrial firms have learned this lesson the hard way. I think your public relations and advertising people are experts. They know the cosmetic business. That is why you hire them, but the use of this new tracer technique in helping to sell the housewife, the layman of any kind, presents some new problems for them. There is also a second reason given. The public is fearful of atomic energy and, therefore, one should not say that he used radioactive isotopes in the development of a product. I disagree with this heartily. Of course, there is a great deal of fear on the weapons side. It constitutes in many cases a mental block, but there are ways around this. The public wants to know everything it can about atomic energy, and I know it can be told in simple terms so that the layman can understand it. Thirdly, there is another great misconception which many of us who deal in the business of informing the public like to conjure up and that is that the general public is much more ignorant than we are and cannot under- stand this new field. If we try to show how a tooth paste or a cleansing cream was developed on a scientific basis with the use of radioactive iso- topes, a situation in which we can prove that the cleansing cream is better than anybody else's product, we seem to think that this is too deep, the public cannot absorb it. Anyone who maintains that is dead wrong. Let us take a case. Many of you have seen on television the use of the Accu-ray, a very nice name applied to what they called up to now "an electronic device" used in the production of a certain brand of cigarettes. This does not make any sense at all to me. Here is the first time in which a beta density gauge has been used very effectively and very practically in controlling the amount of tobacco that goes into each cigarette, thus solv- ing a ticklish problem the cigarette industry has had for a long time. Again

1955 SEMINAR DISCUSSION 271 in my opinion, this would have made a great impression with the public had the company come out and said it was the first to use the products of the atomic age to develop a better product. But they did not do it. Obviously I am prejudiced, I suppose, but I certainly feel there is great promotional capital to be made in such situations. I can prove my point to some extent in the case of the Accu-ray. A couple of months ago there was a conference on atomic energy in Switzerland. I helped organize an industrial exhibit of products that were for sale. The American Machine and Foundry Company makes cigarette machines and also makes the beta density gauge used on these machines. It decided to include in its large exhibit this density gauge. What happened? That cigarette machine with its Accu-ray was the star performer in the U.S. show. The American Machine and Foundry Company had mechanical hands which picked up cigarettes and gave them to the visitors, who walked off smoking. No one asked, "Is this cigarette radioactive?" The promotion branches of your industry have been slower than you people in the technical and development lines in the utilization of atomic energy. I believe a seminar of this kind is of immense help. I hope it will stimulate a lot of you to go back to your companies and develop radiation techniques of your own. But when a new product results don't let your management and the sales division of your company shy away from using the sales power of the atom and thus miss an opportunity to put your prod- uct ahead of everybody else's. I am sure that's the reason you and your company are in business. MARTIN KUNA (Bristol-Myers Products Division, Hillside 5, N.J.) The problems of the cosmetic industry are much different from others in that the things which the cosmetic industry has to work with, namely, the skin, hair and teeth, are much more diverse in nature. These properties vary with different animal species, within a single species, with individuals of a species and finally also on the individual. The use of radioisotopes to help solve some of the problems presents a challenge as to the source material and reproducibility of results. At the present time, in order to initiate a study utilizing radioisotopes on the skin, hair or teeth, a statistician must design the experiment in conjunction with the radio chemist so that the results may be analyzed statistically. Natu- rally, this means a large number of samples and readings. The cosmetic industry will use the results obtained from these radio- isotope experiments in its advertising campaigns only if and when the re- suits are-statistically significant to substantiate claims.