An excerpt from the keynote address to the Canadian Society for the Weizmann Institute of Science, on June 2 in Toronto:

It was in Manchester that I worked as a research student in an ill-lit basement laboratory, with rats prowling along the water pipes overhead. These rats, I now realize, were the direct descendants of those who some 40 years earlier had looked down on a young scientist more skillful than me, who arrived there in the summer of 1904 from the University of Geneva to conduct experiments in the same basement.

His name was Chaim Weizmann. A factual account of Weizmann's Manchester days is to be found in Lionel Davidson's The Sun Chemist. He was a refugee, of a sort, from Switzerland, in flight from a situation in which he was engaged to one young woman while in love with another. After a decent interval in Manchester he solved the problem by inviting the second lady, Vera, to join him there as his wife.

Through this he acquired a scientist brother-in-law in Paris, with a professional interest in fermentation. His imagination stimulated, Mr. Weizmann, a synthetic organic chemist, decided to find out how good bacteria might be at synthetic organic chemistry. He soon found that they were a lot more skillful than him. They were able to make something called butyl alcohol out of sugar.

Weizmann took this amazing finding to his boss, the august Professor William Henry Perkin. Perkin, who was not given to jokes, was moved on this occasion to make a pun: "Your butyl alcohol is a futile alcohol. Pour it down the sink," he advised.

Weizmann was much too delighted by his discovery to do that. Instead he analyzed the material and found that one-third of what he had at first thought to be simply butyl alcohol was instead a widely used solvent called acetone. That was the good news. The bad news was that acetone was as useless as butyl alcohol. It was a carbon compound that could at the time be obtained cheaply by strongly heating wood. It was supplied to the world by the charcoal-makers of Europe.

But then two things happened: World War One broke out, and at the same time the British Navy became desperate for a smokeless gunpowder called cordite. In the absence of cordite, great puffs of smoke give away the position of a ship. But the manufacture of cordite requires lashings of acetone. All the forests of England reduced to charcoal would not have provided the necessary acetone.

So it came about that the Director of Research for Nobel Explosives in Scotland arrived in Manchester, in a panic, to consult with Prof. Perkin. Providentially he ran into Chaim Weizmann, who told him about his acetone-producing bacteria.

In no time Weizmann found himself on a train to London to be interviewed by the First Lord of the Admiralty. He explained to his Lordship that the bacterium, a microscopic creature rejoicing in the name Clostridium acetobutylicum weizmann, would readily make the necessary tons of acetone provided that a sufficiently large fermentation and distillation plant could be found. The First Lord, a Mr. Winston Churchill, explained kindly to Weizmann that he knew some distillers, and though he would not wish to interfere with the supply of whisky he could get Weizmann a gin factory. Weizmann thereupon became chief scientist of the Nicholson Gin Company, and an ally of a politician with an interest in a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

If you have attended closely, you will have detected a technical oddity. Sugar does not grow in England. How were the huge amounts necessary for the manufacture of acetone to be obtained? British distillers recommended maize instead. So it came about, later in World War One, that the bacterium weizmann, though not its discoverer, emigrated to Toronto, where the supply of maize, that we call corn, as well as the supply of distilleries, was plentiful....

You need not bother looking for Toronto's acetone plants. After World War One, with the widespread introduction of automobiles, the petroleum industry generated enough acetone to put those plants out of business. Bacterium weizmann joined the ranks of the unemployed. Or so you might think. But you would be wrong.

For to sell cars it is important to make them shiny, by covering them with multiple layers of fast­drying paint. The best solvent for this turns out to be butyl alcohol — the very same futile alcohol that Prof. Perkin instructed Weizmann to pour down the sink. Weizmann's bacterium is still, I believe, working flat out.

Keynotehood requires one to draw morals, and it is time I did so . . . . It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because those in my profession despise utility, any more than do those in yours. But because we know, as Chaim Weizmann's, and countless other scientific sagas show, that useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.

If this simple fact were recognized in Canada, as I believe it is recognized in your support of the Weizmann Institute, Canadian science would be freed to become a mainspring for progress.

John C. Polanyi, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for chemistry, is a professor in the chemistry department, University of Toronto.