July 20, 1998 GAINESVILLE ---Chemists at the University of
Florida are perfecting ways to take industrial waste and turn it
into new medical compounds that have the potential to
significantly reduce the cost of some prescription drugs. The
chemists use bacteria that occurs naturally in soil to transform
harmful chemicals like benzene, found in oil and oil products,
into useful compounds that can be turned into drugs. "We can
transform environmentally unfriendly chemicals into something
friendly and useful," said David Gonzalez, a chemistry research
assistant at UF. In a process known as ?Green Chemistry,'
chemists feed the chemical or industrial waste to the bacteria
Pseudomonas putida in the lab. The bacteria consumes the waste,
leaving behind valuable compounds. The process reduces
environmentally unfriendly and costly wastes that might
otherwise end up in the soil. The bacteria was discovered in the
1960s at the University of Illinois, with research continuing at
the University of Texas and the University