In early 1973, I returned to Israel from a post-doctoral fellowship at
Harvard University, and was accepted as a lecturer in the Department of
Applied Microbiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shortly
after my return, Professor Richard Mateles, who at that time was head of
the Department, suggested that I purchase a good and comprehensive book
on single cell protein (SCP) in order to expand my general knowledge in
the subject I had started then to work on; that was microbial
utilization of one-carbon (C ) compounds. l Naturally, I took his advice
(after all, he was the Boss) and bought the book, which was the only
general book published on this subject at that time, and was based on
papers presented at the First International Conference on Single Cell
Protein, held at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), on
October 1967 (Mateles and Tannenbaum, editors) [1]. Through this book
I became acquainted with the world's hunger problem that existed in the
past, and ways in which it was to be solved by SCP products prepared
from CO, fossil-based raw 2 materials, and from wastes.