Science: Revolution In the Desert

With the Southwest facing one of the worst droughts in its history, the hunt was on for new ways to get around the perennial shortage of rain. Last week in El Paso, young (30) Dr. Peter Duisberg, agricultural chemist from New Mexico A. & M., reported to the Southwestern Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that desert research might well be "opening up a new agricultural frontier." He was ready to name scores of plants that need almost no water and might be converted into products varying all the way from varnish to broomstraws.

Chemist Duisberg had begun...

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