AN AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1990
VOLUME 4, NUMBER 6
Q Copyright 1990 by the American Chemical Society
Ed it orial ACS Symposium on Porphyrin GeochemistryThe Quest for Analytical Reliability Organizing Committee:
David H. Freeman, J. Martin Quirke, T. F. Yen, Anthony J. Barwise, Gary J. Van Berkel
You are supposed to notice the subtitle, “The Quest for Analytical Reliability”. That is in honor of those pioneers who, in the combining of HPLC separation with peak isolation and molecular identification, demonstrated unflagging patience and perserverance. Their extensive efforts to separate and isolate naturally occurring porphyrin compounds are followed by structure determination by NMR/MS or X-ray spectroscopy. Efforts such as these proceed forward at a rate of about one sample per year. There is a host of persistent problems in measuring porphyrins quantitatively. There is such a thing as too much patience and perseverance. It was hoped the symposium would produce some needed answers. As it turned out, the April 1990 symposium at the 199th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society exceeded expectations and produced a richness of innovative reports on organic-analytical-biological-geochemical techniques-multidisciplinary is not a strong enough term. The advances were so numerous that scientific progress in the field itself became a theme. The results are at hand and I invite the reader to browse through this issue to experience the significant changes since the last benchmark, the report given in ACS Symposium Series No. 344 (1987). Since you, the reader, stand to benefit from the prompt and time!y appearance of this symposium issue, you should know that a number of people, including the meeting organizers, worked hard to make it happen. International participation was gret1.tly enhanced by gifts from the ACS Petroleum Research Fund, the ACS Division of Petroleum Chemistry, the ACS Division of Geochemistry, and British Petrc!eum Research. Editor John Larsen persuaded contributors to stick to tight deadlines, and they met his challenge by promptly making written reality out of the progress thc had reported verbally. Note the sheer size of this issue and share in our satisfactio that readers, reviewers, editors, writers, their helpers, and sponsors, while loosely i mected, have all made important contributions to the articles on the following pages. David H . Freeman Department of Chemistry University of Maryland College Park, Maryla ad 20742
0887-0624/90/2504-0627$02.50/0
0 1990 American Chemical Society
