e d i to ri a l
“Cadmium Horses” and Glucose T
here is an old saying in America about “beating a dead horse”. The context is a westbound pioneer in our country’s era of exploration and migration. The horse that provides transportation starts to fail and, finally, dies from over-work. The owner, desperate to continue westward progress, beats the poor horse to encourage it to continue, but ultimately to no avail. The horse dies, and progress stops. (I would not be surprised were there an older antecedent to this story.) Some researchers may already see where this editorial is going. It’s to talk about the folly of riding scientific horses that are old and tired and dying. Let me give a specific example, with which I have personal acquaintance. In the 1960s, the theory and instrumentation of numerous new electroanalytical methods were being tested with electrochemical reactions, a favorite and experimentally “friendly” one of which was the reduction of Cd(II) from aqueous solution at a mercury electrode to a Cd(Hg) amalgam. The Cd(II) diffusion properties were reliable, and Cd(II) heterogeneous reduction kinetics were neither too slow as to be trivial to measure nor too fast as to be unachievable by the methods being tested. A wave of papers grew using the Cd(II) reduction reaction to test new electroanalytical methods, and then the wave broke. The community realized that excessive use of the Cd(II) reaction was stultifying progress in understanding electrochemical reactions. The “cadmium horse” had been beaten, and died; some electroanalytical “settlers” perished for want of scientific transportation, and others built new intellectual transportation for electrochemical method exploration using a broadened range of reaction chemistry. This allegorical story is of course over-simplified, but having lived through that era, I don’t believe that I have it far wrong. There have been many cadmium horses in the community of analytical chemistry over the years. I know others but won’t belabor the point. All have the common characteristics of a noble
© 2004 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
measurement goal and an amenable, pliant chemical system on which to practice new measurements. A contemporary example is the bottom line of this Editorial—its name is glucose. The measurement of glucose concentration in blood is clinically important, and the millions of individuals with a diabetic condition provide an exceedingly good rationale for conducting such measurements. A lot of research has and is being thrown at it; the literature of glucose measurement papers grows steadily. Scarcely a week goes by without this journal receiving one or two glucose-measuring papers. A large fraction of these papers are tests of measurements that rest on existing concepts, using glucose as the example, and relying on the importance of the glucose analysis to support the significance of the paper. In my view, little real progress is being made in analytical chemistry by this over-focusing of attention on glucose as a test case. The reviews of such papers are becoming increasingly critical, and the rejection rate is becoming high. Glucose is becoming another cadmium horse. As Editor, I would like to encourage the use of a wider range of chemical examples, even new chemistry, in the testing and evaluation of new analytical measurements. Studies that continue to aim at glucose measurement should either be introducing a genuinely new measurement approach or should directly address the problem from the viewpoint of the diabetic patient, namely a painless measurement that is easily repeated or automated, inexpensive, and personally portable. These research efforts continue to be important and encouraged, and papers describing them are welcomed at Analytical Chemistry.
M A Y 1 , 2 0 0 4 / A N A LY T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y
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