Press
European Magazine
July-August 2003
PIER GIORGIO PIFFERI
You are a chemist, an inventor, you teach food technology at Verona University and you have been a teacher at Bologna University until 2000. Professor Pifferi, why are you called the "potato professor"?
Some patents of mine actually deal with potatoes. One of them has become well - known because of the massive spreading of the "selenium potato". I have found a way of enriching potatoes naturally - simply by sprinkling their leaves with selenium, in order to avoid the variation of the soil's quality. Selenium has a positive biochemical function against several diseases that involve the circulatory system and also against the onset of tumoral facts, more generally, it prolongs life. You can use 40/45 micrograms of selenium per kilo of potatoes, with a fertilization process of the leaves. You might also mix this kind of potatoes with the bovine forage in order to enrich the meat with selenium.
Anyway, is it possible to take selenium in other forms?
You can put selenium into the drinking water, too and we know that it is present above all in fish, but I was working for the "potato farmers'union", with the requirement to typify this product.
Tell us more about your research work on the field of potatoes.
I am working on a technique that avoids the potatoes' germination. You can stop the germination with very small quantities of a substance that presents no danger at all. You cannot present to the consumer a potato that is sprouting. Moreover, a consequence of this process is an increase in glycoalkaloids, which are dangerous and then another one, which is the potatoes' greening, with the result of an edible degradation. To avoid this problem the producers actually used a substance which is now forbidden because it is suspected of being risky for man, so I developed my research and I have achieved my aim. We have tested my invention on seven kinds of potatoes and finally at the end of this year - after the customary 18 months of reserve - the patent will be made public.
Any inventions in other fields?
A pen that tests counterfeit banknotes without fail. As a matter of fact, there was a tester pen- an American patent - of the Canadian dollars, but it identified them all as counterfeit. My method is quick, visual - a certain colour, which can range from tobacco to havana brown, to grey and green, appears on the counterfeit note. This is an European patent that has been extended to other countries, among which Canada, United States, Mexico, Brazil. We have sold two million and a half pens so far.
What is the patent you are mostly proud of?
The use of crabs' pincers to stabilize white wine. You take a shrimp, you clean it and then, if you clean and dry out the remnants with soda, you will have a reaction and chitin, that is the material which the pincers are made of, filters by deacetylation, thus producing sodium acetate and obtaining a polymer called chitosan. I think that this is very interesting. I have thought about more than one application of all this - the aromatization of wines, the perfume development, the stabilization of white wine. Casein is generally used for this purpose, but then it gets lost, while it is possible to regenerate the pincers cold and use them even thirty, forty times.
Which is your unexploited patent?
The sunflower seed is black from the outside. Some years ago I was curious to know what this black was and so, by chance, I discovered that a red substance came out from the inside of these seeds. The black substance of the most tilled species is made of melanins or of substances that do not belong to the pigments'class of red wines. On the contrary, I had accidentally found a species that is suitable for pigmentation. So from a rejected material such as the sunflowers'shell it is possible to derive some food colourings for wine which are similar to the colouring agent of bilberries, i.e. as chemical class. Moreover, these colourings have a very high nutritional value, they are antioxidants. It was possible to derive three products from this sunflower: oil, in lesser quantity compared with the most tilled species, the remnants to be used to feed cattle and these anthocyanins, these colourings. The value that you can gain per gross hectare is five, six times higher than the one you can obtain from the normal sunflowers. I obtained the patent, but I didn't found any farmers or industrialists interested in this invention.
What is the most useful patent?
All of them are useful, but I would like to mention the one used for the elimination of pesticides, in particular from wine. I am talking about five or six phytosanitary products that can be present on the grapes' peel and that can also filter through the wine. I use the remnants of the apples - when you make cider - I mean the residue, that is cleaned, purified and slightly modified from the chemical point of view. This residue is able to absorb up to seven pesticides at once in two hours and a half's time and these pesticides are almost completely removed from wine. This invention has given me great satisfaction.
