TABLE OF CONTENTS "With what materials may the Sabbath lamp be lighted, and with what may it not be lighted? It may not be lighted with cedar-bast, nor with uncombed flax, nor with floss-silk, nor with willow-fibre, nor with nettle fibre, nor with water-weeds."
Talmud, Treatise Shabbath, Ch. ii:
The conversion of virtually unlimited solar energy into valuable products such as chemicals, fuels or energy-rich food has attracted the attention of scientists and entrepreneurs for some time. Although photosynthetic conversion has been the cornerstone of agriculture since the chalcolithic material cultures of some ten thousand years ago, marine and freshwater algae have only rarely been considered in this context. Historically, algae have been harvested from the wild, and attempts to cultivate them have lagged considerably behind the farming of terrestrial plants (vander Meer, 1988).
Since the 1940s, however, the vastness of the oceans and the recognition of their productive potential have led to extensive basic and applied research into algal culture on both the laboratory and the mass scale. These efforts have resulted in many reports, symposia and books (Burlew, 1953; Shelef and Soeder, 1980; Richmond, 1986; Stadler et al., 1988; Cresswell et al., 1989; Akatsuka, 1990; Lee, 1994; Phang et al., 1994). Moreover, algae have fired popular myth, cult and fancy, as amply demonstrated...
