EDITORIAL
Balkanization or Union? Balkanization is an old term referring to the separation or partition of a larger entity into smaller parts. We have witnessed this phenomenon in recent years in many areas of the world, in some cases with sad consequences. Balkanization is also a phenomenon that is possible in chemistry, as we can see by the proliferation of differently labeled and often quite successful chemical specialty journals, specialty professional meetings, and specialty chemical societies. Should analytical chemists be concerned about excessive fragmenting of their discipline? The root of disciplinary fragmentation is technical specialization. Numerous factors encourage chemists, all through their careers, to become technical specialists. In graduate research the student is exposed in depth to the particular area—be it chromatography, electrochemistry, mass spectrometry, or some other discipline—of his or her Ph.D. adviser. Those who enter academic life are driven to create a recognized intellectual niche in the interest of a positive tenure decision, and subsequently to enlarge that niche in the pursuit of continued grant award support and stature in the profession. This further encourages specialization. We seldom see transformations of academic atomic spectroscopists into electrochemists or of mass spectrometrists into chromotographers. There are risks in changing research specialties, and the research grant support system does not reward those who attempt it and become less productive scholars. Those who choose industrial careers follow the specialization path less strongly because the risks of learning new areas are underwritten by the employer in the interest of the best uses of human resources. Nonetheless, successful industrial R&D careers are often marked by a specialty focus.
Specialization, of course, provides the depths of understanding and skill that are part of the creative process of research in analytical chemistry, and thereby has great value. I in no way decry the importance of intellectual depth. I would assert at the same time that, difficult as it may be, it is terrifically important for analytical chemists to remember the value of broadening their knowledge of the many ways of measuring properties of chemical systems. Broad knowledge facilitates reaching out to problems on the growing edges of analytical chemistry and of other science disciplines. The synthesis of depth with breadth has created the important unions of mass spectrometry with biochemistry, of capillary electrophoresis with organized media, of electrochemistry with polymer films, and (via astronomy) charge-coupled devices with laserinduced fluorescence. Part of the activity creating these new opportunities is attending meetings with a broad offering of chemical areas, publishing in journals read by a more general rather than a specialty audience, and reading such journals. Such interaction between analytical chemists and chemists and scientists at large strengthens the discipline by drawing to us others who discover the pleasure of measurement science. The world of analytical chemists is incomplete without those who strongly specialize and those who cross-fertilize their specialties with other areas in chemistry and other sciences. ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY is proud to welcome and to serve readers and authors from strongly specialized analytical areas and from the "fringes," in the union of general knowledge that the JOURNAL represents.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 65, NO. 11, JUNE 1, 1993 · 519 A
