The Pittsburgh Press (January 11, 1945)
Gracie Allen Reporting
By Gracie Allen
I hope that news story about the dogs in Illinois eating up all the soybean auto license plates will be a good lesson for the scientists.
When science starts something no one, including the scientists, knows where it is going to finish. I understand it was a determined alchemist who was trying to turn lead into gold when he accidentally discovered gunpowder. And now where are we?
And I think Thomas A. Edison would have thought twice about inventing the phonograph if he had realized he would be known as the “father of the jukebox.”
Personally, the more I hear about the soybean the more it frightens me. Why, it could become a vegetable Frankenstein. It seems you can make anything from soup to steamships with it. You can eat the soybean, live in it, wear it, and make jokes out of it.
Already science knows how to make mechanical men. Maybe someday we’ll have a soybean husband. But the day I’m looking forward to is when some scientist figures out how to make a scientist out of soybeans. It will serve him right.