Cooks in Japan first used agar in their kitchens, but agar spread from Japan to cuisines in many parts of East Asia and the Pacific. In fact, the name “agar” comes from a Malay word for red algae, agar-agar.
The first use of agar as a growth medium for bacteria was not in Japan or elsewhere in East Asia, however.
That use for agar first began in Germany in the late 19th century. In the 1880s, scientists in the great German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch’s laboratory first used agar as a growth medium for bacteria.
Utilizing agar, they succeeded in isolating the bacterias that caused tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax for the first time– discoveries that saved the lives of untold millions.
It was agar’s exceptional ability to serve as a bacterial medium that led to the agar factory in Beaufort.
Prior to 1939, the vast majority of the world’s supply of bacteriological agar came from Japan, where agar was produced mainly from a red seaweed whose scientific name is Gelidium corneum.
With that supply cut off by the war, many of the Allied countries began seeking to develop their own internal sources of agar.
In a time of war, the availability of bacteriological agar was especially important in medicine.
Physicians and microbiologists sometimes relied on agar to grow bacterial cultures in order to identify diseases. More commonly, they relied on agar to produce vaccines and to grow Staphylococcus aureus (one of the leading causes of wound infections) and other bacteria to test the potency of penicillin.
Great Britain was among the first countries that recognized a shortage of agar as a national emergency. Beginning in 1942, British leaders initiated the large-scale harvesting of red seaweeds on England’s west coast and to a lesser extent in Northumberland.
The United States also declared agar a “critical war material” and moved to assure an adequate supply of agar in 1942.
According to an AP story (April 1943), the federal government’s War Production Board (WPB) froze the nation’s entire stock of agar in 1942, restricting its use to medical and pharmaceutical purposes. In addition, the WPB authorized the creation of a federal stockpile of 750,000 pounds of agar, more than twice what was available in the country at the time.
The AP story also noted that the U. S. had been using approximately 600,000 pounds of agar a year prior to the war, nearly all of it obtained from Japan.
On a quest to develop a domestic supply of agar, the Food and Drug Administration’s E. G. Poindexter seems to have started the inquiry that led to the agar factory on Pivers Island.