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A Pittcon Preview T
his Editorial is a little preview of a talk that I will give at Pittcon in Chicago in March during the symposium “What Will It Mean To Be an Analytical Chemist in 2008?”, organized by Michael Natan. My title, “Analytical Chemistry Is What Analytical Chemists Do”, is not deliberately cheeky; Charles N. Reilley used it in his ACS Analytical Chemistry (Fisher) Award address in April 1965. Reilley spoke some timeless gems about the teaching of analytical chemistry. One was, “Today, with the over-whelming growth of knowledge, there is simply no time for easily out-dated frills in our curriculum. As a result, it is essential that stress be given to core concepts—those principles that will remain as firm foundations for our thinking and action ten and, hopefully, twenty years hence.” Another gem was, “In attempting to decide what subject matter should be included in today’s curriculum, it is necessary to judge this, not from what has been the traditional content, but from the viewpoint of current research procedures and interests.” Natan’s question echoes Reilley’s view and can be translated as, “What will analytical chemists be doing in 2008, and what fundamental concepts will underlie their work?” The answers provide a guide to future classroom offerings. Although graduate education has a deeper focus, I emphasize here the undergraduate years since they are the crucial ones for attracting bright young minds to analytical chemistry. Much of 2008 can be anticipated from trends of the past few years. The objects of analysis are chemical materials that are increasingly tiny in dimension and complex in composition. The challenges of complex biological materials will be prominent—the contents of single biological cells, for example. Other materials will be spawned by the growing nanoscience research area and by attention to nanoparticulates in our environment. Another need—the result of criminal activity in today’s world—is rapid assaying of biological activity and chemical toxicity. Yet others are high-throughput analysis, prompted by new modes of synthesis and by genomics and proteomics advances, and user-friendly analysis, as various analytical kits make their way to the consumer marketplace. This last category includes concepts of integrating multiple instrument tasks together into a compact, mass-producible entity (i.e., “microchips” and the like).
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The fundamentals that support the above objectives will continue to include those of chemical separations, optical spectroscopy, electrochemistry, and MS. These topics have already substantially infiltrated sophomore-level analytical courses and texts, and this healthy trend should continue. On the other hand, textbooks for the junior/senior “instrumental analysis” course have some problems, in my opinion. The traditional organization focuses on assembly and principles of instruments for various methods, rather than on ways to investigate a particular kind of chemistry or chemical phenomenon. Students faced with an actual analytical task need some lessons in method selection. Additionally, some newer measurement concepts are generally missing. For example, what kinds of measurements are adaptable to use in array detectors? Another category is treatment of chemical microscopy organized around the scale of resolvable dimensions and the kinds of information (chemical, topographical, electronic, etc.) that provide the contrast in the imaging. How can you detect and measure binding between molecules (receptor chemistry, affinity responses, etc.) or measure DNA hybridization and use it for analytical purposes? What are the general tradeoffs between the capabilities of full-sized and miniaturized instruments? Without burying the student in abstract mathematics, how do you extract analytical information from array detectors? I have limited space; these are just a few examples. I do not advocate, however, teaching students with a broad-brush “how to do it” approach that omits the underlying principles of the measurement; the framework of the principles of general methods must be retained in the instrumental analysis course. Undergraduate texts of course have enormous influence on what is taught in analytical chemistry courses. Adding new materials to an undergraduate (or graduate) curriculum is relatively easy—as long as the writer or teacher is up-to-date on current needs. Deletion of existing materials is the hard part, and writers of undergraduate texts never seem to delete anything, but just add more pages. But real curricula are finite and bounded! I’ll leave words on this part for Chicago.
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