EDITORIAL
August 3-7, 1992, a t New Hampton School in rural New Hampton, NH, is the time and place for the next Gordon Research Conference on Analytical Chemistry. I would like to invite you to consider participating in this conference, which is to be chaired by Isiah Warner. Program information is found elsewhere in this issue. For those of you unfamiliar with the Gordon Conference format for meetings, they are held at sites remote from other distractions and offer the attributes of scenic beauty and a pleasant climate. Morning and evening lecture sessions are graced by a generous opportunity for discussion and questioning. More importantly, the rules forbid subsequent citation of lectures and discussion so that you are apt to hear the latest results and their preliminary interpretations, and thereby encounter more often the cutting edges of chemistry as they emerge. Afternoons are free for walking in the woods or for arguing chemistry with other conferees. Throughout my career I have attended at least one Gordon Conference a year, and I give their format a strong endorsement for the serious scholar. I also have many fond memories of the pleasant environment a t New Hampton and the many wonderful analytical chemistry scholars outside my own specialty that I met and came to know there. The Analytical Chemistry Gordon Conference is especially important to the analytical community because it gathers together leading scholars across a broad face of analytical sciences. The everincreasing complexity of our subdiscipline (a characteristic shared by all vigorous chemical subdisciplines) has led to our increasingly narrow specialization. Conference planners and chemists in general have reflected this tendency toward specialization in their organization
of meetings and in their decisions as to which journals are published. We chemists at times act like grackles that congregate together and cackle in similar ways. Electrochemists congregate in electrochemistry conferences and rub electrons with their fellow electron pushers; chromatographers and spectroscopists similarly congregate and compare columns and photons. Birds - ofa-feather behavior is of course intellectually useful in advancing knowledge in individual subjects, but it leads to isolation in our thinking about science and about our community. Analytical chemists must think of their discipline in a broader framework. Educators must consider a balanced approach to the education of their students; industrialists must have the intellectual breadth to launch multitechnique approaches to the problems of analysis of diverse bodies of chemicals in diverse matrices. shares with the AnalytiThe JOURNAL cal Chemistry Gordon Conference a commitment to a general approach to analytical chemistry and an aim of presenting the best current science across the discipline. Analytical chemists need to stay aware of the developments in the analytical discipline that are outside their individual specialties. Such awareness is maintained only by a willingness to be exposed to and-in the natural scheme of scientific discussion, to inquire into and challenge for understanding-specialties outside our own niches. It is in this spirit of discouraging overspecialization that I urge everyone to examine the Analytical Chemistry Gordon Conference program for this summer. Isiah Warner has assembled an excellent representation of the breadth of analytical chemistry.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 64, NO. 7, APRIL 1, 1992
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