''Analytical Chemistry Is What Analytical Chemists Doyy
T
he title quotes a famous remark by Charles N. Reilley on the occasion of his Fisher Award address at the April 1965 ACS national meeting. I have just re-read a copy of Reilley's opening remarks, in which are found some timeless gems on the teaching of analytical chemistry.
have been an important part of the intellectual vitality that analytical chemistry enjoys as a discipline today. For the future, though, changes toward modernization must continue. Education in science must be a continuing frontier, else it will stagnate and fail. In that context, I wonder how vigorously the existing mix of topics in the beginning underToday, the overwhelming growth of know'graduate analytical course can be justified as edge, there is simply no time for easily outdated frills matching up with what students need to know in our curriculum. As a result, it is essential that about analytical chemistry when they become stress be given to core concepts-those principles professional chemists. I throw a specific stone. To that will remain as firm foundations for our thinking and action ten and, hopefully, twenty years hence. what extent is modern analytical chemistry In attempting to decide what subject matter based on the acts of gravime~canalysis and titishould be included in today's curriculum, it is necesmetry? To what extent are determinations of sary to judge this, not from what has been the tradiacids and bases or investigations of chemical tional content, but from the viewpoint of current reequilibria made with a titration? In my view, search procedures and interests. these topics are tenaciously hanging onto a disReilley went on to suggest some other tunicproportionate share of extremely valuable real e s ulxchanges.Inthefirst~ex,heurgedthatlab- tateinanybeginninganalyticalchemistry oratories become more quantitative and include course. Their merits should be weighed, relative an introduction to gravimem and titrimetry. For to giving more attention to, for example, separathe sophomore Year, he urged major surgery tions (capillary electrophoresis!), spectroscopy ("an adiabatic transition") with a change to em(laser-induced fluorescence!), statistics, and ~ h a s i s o n s e ~ a r a t i o n s a n d s ~ e c ~ o s c o ~ ~ w i tMS.Somehardchoicesneedtobeconsidh~a small amount of chemical equilibria." Reilley was ered-by educators, by laboratory designers, speaking at a time of some turbulence in chemand by textbook -ters. istry, when some were questioning the relevance "Analytical chemistry is [still] what analytical of analytical chemistry as a discipline. He recogchemists do." And as &ages occur in what manized that what we teach is what we are perlytical chemists do in their work in industrial, ceived to be, and he observed that "The tradigovernment, and academic laboratories, educathnal sophomore Course has b w m e so steeped tors must recognize that so that what is taught as in tradition that it has become seriously out of analytical chemistry truthfully defines the topic. touch with today's needs." Important and sweeping changes did occur as a result of the urgings of Reilley and of other leaders in the field, many just as prescribed above. I believe that such changes in the past
682 A Analytical Chemistry, Vol. 66, No. 13, July 1, 1994
