In times of crises, great men move fast. This is like that, but different.
Dr. Lyon Playfair was fairly sensible, and while he was most properly a chemist, he is remembered also as an effective administrator and politician, and popularized the Playfair cipher, which while not invented by him, was pushed into effective use in Wold War I at his recommendation. He also stuck his nose into pretty much anything he could. Having the ear of Sir Robert Peel, he didn't hesitate to stick his nose in the the impending famine as well. He strongly recommended science(!) as a possible solution to the potato blight; the potatoes of Ireland might be unappetizing black, slimy lumps, but perhaps *chemistry* could make them edible?
October 24th saw him and Dr. John Lindley in Ireland as part of the Scientific Commission in Ireland, with a mission to save the potato. Professor Robert Kane (soon to become Sir Robert Kane) would soon join them as a local expert. The three scientists needed little time to confirm that things were as bad as the doomsayers were saying, and perhaps a bit worse ("...we cannot conceal from ourselves that the case is much worse than the public supposes.").
Unfortunately, their usefulness ended there. They put out a report ("Advice concerning the Potato crop to the Farmers and Peasantry of Ireland") that was rather out-of-touch with the fiscal (and educational) realities of the working class, giving a complicated set of instructions for preparing and storing healthy potatoes so as to protect them form the blight. It finished quite frankly, "If you do not understand this, ask your landlord or clergyman to explain the meaning." By my reading, the advice boils down to 'make sure the storage pit is well drained and cover everything with lots of fresh lime'.
They then went on to give a recipe for preparing the rotten potatoes. One simply needed to rasp the bad potatoes into a fine mush, wash the pulp, strain it through a clean linen cloth, repeat, dry the pulp on a griddle, take the white, milky substance remaining in the washing water (the starch), and mix it with the dried potato pulp and some bean-meal, oatmeal, or flour. This would make a wholesome form of bread.
It was noted by many optimistic commentators that this starch was not too hard to remove from the spoiled potatoes, and not too hard to mix with pretty much anything; Playfair and Lindley were forced to note that starch is not very nutritional, and will not, on its own, save animals or humans from starvation.
Others noted that if you cut off the bad parts quickly and boiled the good bits, animals would feed on them; this was an effective way of turning some of the potatoes into meat.
Many other recipes were recommended by many other sources, most of them entirely inappropriate for the class of person who was to subsist on potatoes. Some were clearly insane, as the recipe for homemade chlorine gas to be used to treat the potatoes, while others were simply wishful thinking, such as the plan to reverse the blight by soaking the diseased potatoes in bog water. One writer claimed that of you baked the potatoes at just the right temperature for long enough, the black bits would simply melt out, leaving healthy potatoes. I pause here to point out that these, along with other misadventures of the mid-1800s press, are not different in type or scope than the nonsense that passes around Twitter of Facebook.
Regardless, no storage method was found that would preserve the potatoes; no preparation of blighted potatoes was sufficient to stave off starvation.
On November 12th, having produced a number or wordy reports and a not-very-useful fact-sheet for Irish farmers, the Scientific Commission returned to England, their work done, no progress made.
It should be noted that Dr. Playfair was strongly pro free trade, and played a role in Peel's drive to repeal and/or work around the corn laws; while his dreams of Saving the World Through Chemistry were perhaps overblown, he did good in the ways he could, and did more to take the edge off the pending apocalypse than did the average politician.