Can This Unassuming Little Desert Shrub Really Save The World?

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No one really knows how long the native peoples of the U.S. Southwest have been harvesting and using the nut of the jojoba (ho-ho-be) shrub. As early as 1769, however, the famous Spanish missionary Junipero Serra reported that he had seen California Indians cooking with jojoba oil and using the fluid as a healing agent on wounds.

And there the matter rested until 1822, when an H.F. Link attempted to classify the jojoba plant. Unfortunately for us all, though, Mr. Link foolishly mixed his jojoba specimens (collected from the Sonora Desert) ... with other plants gathered on a later field trip to China. This has since created two problems: [1] It caused a number of other botanists to waste a great deal of time, energy, and money fruitlessly searching that Asiatic country for the plant, and [2] it leaves the jojoba—a bona fide native of North America-saddled to this day with the misleading scientific name of Sim mondsia chinensis.

Still, it's hard to keep a good plant (even a misnamed one) down. And the hardy jojoba shrub-which can not only thrive in the kind of hot, dry deserts that kill most growing things, but produce an extremely valuable oil while doing it- is, indeed, a very good plant. Good enough, at any rate, to encourage several government agencies to attempt to introduce the jojoba to semi-arid, povertystricken northern Africa over the years. These efforts all failed, however, and the plant once again fell into obscurity.

Suddenly World War II—with its hotly contested struggles for control of both the planet's land masses and sea laneschanged all that. The increasingly sophisticated war machines thrown into the fray by nations on both sides of the conflict consumed absolutely frightening quantities of highpressure lubricants ... and that caused problems for everyone.

"High-pressure lubricants", you see, are not just ordinary cans of plants, animals, or petroleum-derived oil with a few extra additives thrown in. Not the really good ones. Rather, they're very special liquid waxes made up of nonglyceride esters (instead of the more common triglycerides) ... and each of these nonglyceride esters is almost entirely composed of straight-chain acids and alcohols, each of which has 20 or 22 carbon atoms and 1 unsaturated bond.

This particular wax-ester structure is not at all easy to synthesize in commercial quantities and there seem to be two-and only two-natural sources of the chemical compound: [1] sperm whales, and [2] the-you guessed it! —jojoba shrub. And with naval battles, lurking submarines, and spy ships and boats of all descriptions cluttering up the globe's oceans and sharply reducing everyone's whaling activities ... it was only natural that Allied Forces (which owned a near-monopoly on the plant) began experimenting with the harvest of the wild jojoba and the extraction of its oil.

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