Instrument Builders, Take a Bow What do analytical chemists do? That's an invitation to a long and, because even editorials have space limitations, necessarily incomplete list. Some analytical chemists serve business and society by devising procedures and carrying out quality control as well as environmental, health, and safety monitoring; some support research efforts in other areas with analytical characterizations of prospective pharmaceutical, agricultural, clinical, and polymeric products; others support chemical manufacturing by identifying and helping to solve process, feedstock, and other problems; and yet others counsel governmental organizations about regulatory policy. Some analytical chemists teach undergraduate and graduate students about these things; others manage their direction and activities. A few scholars dream about the principles by which chemical measurements can be made. It's really a huge list of different personal activities in our discipline, and I haven't named them all! There is another group of folks who serve as a hinge point for all the others: the scholars who understand and appreciate the principles of chemical measurements and the kinds of new measurements that could be important, and who design instruments and invent devices to carry them out. These are the instrument builders, vital contributors to analytical chemistry. Stop and think a moment. (Those of you who are only modestly long in the tooth like I am can do this easily.) Electrochemists, recall the radio tube op-amps, potentiostats bread-boarded over a couple of square feet of instrument panel, and transient responses read from a photo of an oscilloscope trace. Spectroscopists, t h i n k back to collecting spectra point by point with single-beam spectrophotometers and detectors that got tired with continued use. Chromatographers, remember when a good multiplate separation
meant a distillation column or a countercurrent extraction apparatus. Mercifully, I will stop. I hope you get my drift: The science of a n a l y t i c a l c h e m i s t r y h a s changed and advanced because of enormous improvements in chemical instrumentation, and instrument builders are indeed hinge points around whose successes nearly all of our other activities pivot. Besides heaping praise on the instrument builders of our community, I can think of several other points. First, why do we shower our undergraduate laboratories with bare-bones and time-inefficient i n s t r u m e n t s ? The s t a n d a r d r e sponse—that this makes it easier to see the "guts" of the thing and appreciate its functioning—has some truth, but do we teachers also want our students to appreciate the delights of the good old days? Second, the seeds of interest and skill in instrument building need continued n u r t u r i n g among our students and among the newcomers to chemical industry; these folks need the time to digest some basic electronics and t h e physical principles of measuring systems. Finally, beginning with the widespread marriages of computer systems to chemical instruments, my perception is that the desire of instrument users to understand how they work and to engage in instrument-building research is becoming less pervasive in chemistry and analytical chemistry. This evolution places a heavy responsibility on analytical chemists in instrument companies, on whom the role of instrument builder increasingly falls, to maintain a keen awareness of newly discovered principles on which instruments can be built. There is every indication that this is being successfully accomplished.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 65, NO. 13, JULY 1, 1993 • 571 A
