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Jonathan W. Amy and the Amy Facility for Instrumentation Development R. Graham Cooks Anal. Chem., Just Accepted Manuscript • DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.7b00158 • Publication Date (Web): 13 Apr 2017 Downloaded from http://pubs.acs.org on April 13, 2017
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Jonathan W. Amy and the Amy Facility for Instrumentation Development R. Graham Cooks Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
[email protected] Jonathan W. Amy, (b. 1923 – d. 2016), professor of Chemistry, Purdue University, was responsible for a unique model for the development, improvement and utilization of analytical instrumentation for chemical research. This model was embodied in an instrumentation facility, founded in the 1950’s, which came to be known as the Jonathan Amy Facility for Instrumentation Development. Centralized facilities have since become important throughout science, exemplified by NIH ‘core facilities’ and by spectroscopic services facilities that are common in Chemistry and other academic departments. Both these types aim primarily to serve the ‘customer’, often the synthetic chemistry or biomedical science community. Not only did the Amy Facility predate these developments but it was unique in its primary emphasis on the development of analytical instrumentation. As such it was primarily an analytical chemists’ facility with service to the rest of chemistry being a consequence not the prime driver. Jon Amy’s approach to instrumentation development was based on tackling particular problems by combining the energy and expertise of his staff with that of graduate students and their faculty mentor. This triad of could be assembled readily, so its flexibility allowed it to be directed at emerging technologies. Another strength was the fact that the facility early on acquired permanent staff lines, so its Director was answerable only to the Head of Department. Prioritization of projects was in the Jon Amy’s hands and his Facility did not operate in a pay-for-services mode. Yet another strength was that Jon Amy had a personal mission to solve problems and to provide technical assistance. He therefore directed his group to contribute to many aspects of Departmental research, including repair of equipment, providing shop facilities, and improving upon commercial instruments. These activities engendered much good will, even though the majority in the Department did not participate in the core activity of the Amy Facility which was the development of novel instrumentation. The Facilities activities expanded with time to include assisting new faculty to purchase as well as build instrumentation. There is little debate amongst those who know Purdue Chemistry as to the enormous impact that the Amy Instrumentation has had on the successes of its faculty and students. It is often given as the top reason why a physical or analytical chemist accepts a position at Purdue and is even more important as to why such a person stays. The scale of the instrumentation development program in the Purdue Chemistry Department can be judged by the numbers of new instruments built. In the area of mass spectrometry alone more than 30 new systems (new geometries, like the first hybrids – having multiple analyzers of different types, surface scattering instruments, pentaquadrupole instruments, reverse geometry sector instruments, dual ion traps, SIMS instruments, ion soft landing instruments, miniature ion traps, etc) were built, usually by the triad: graduate students/faculty mentor/instrumentation specialist. In other cases, existing infrastructure for instrumentation allowed single investigators to build and to greatly modify existing instrumentation. Similar achievements occurred in photoelectron spectroscopy (negative ion photoelectron spectroscopy), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, ellipsometry, portable and 1 ACS Paragon Plus Environment
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other novel chromatographic systems, microfluidic systems, and on all the way to a complete airborne laboratory. NMR flourished early at Purdue, one achievement being a 470 MHz instrument which was the first working instrument in the country at that field. Other notable developments included miniature NMR probes which allowed difference spectra to be recorded. Jon and his staff would spend considerable time on a technology, working within a particular research groups. Jon also worked closely with many companies, motivated by bringing prototype instruments to Purdue for evaluation and refinement. He and his Amy Facility Colleagues, especially Bill Baitinger, went to the Pittsburgh Conference every year and came away with a knowledge of new technology and the people behind it. The companies they worked closely with included Perkin Elmer, Wilkens Instruments, Hewlett Packard, Keithley Instruments, Hitachi, Oxford Instruments, Finnigan Corporation and many, many others. Jon saw other people’s points of view clearly, and sought to provide value to both the academic research staff and to the commercial enterprise. In an email of June 2003, Jon Amy described some of these projects, then finishing with a summary of the motivation for all his work: “Bill Baitinger played key roles in the IKES and MIKES MS developments, as well as the surface work Winograd was doing with the ESCA and ion implant[ation] system. Our contribution to the ESCA program was to find the practical problems of the original HP prototype instrument and then rebuild it to eliminate or minimize them. Bill and I put the first devices on an ESCA to reduce sample charging, using both a UV lamp and an electron gun to flood the sample with photons or electrons. Both worked, but the electron beam was best, and that was what was used commercially. Our early projects included the design and assembly of what became the first commercial IR grating instrument, the Perkin-Elmer 112G. Parts were being built for us by PE when their plant flooded, and they sent everything to Purdue, essentially an instrument in a basket. We found the gratings were more efficient than expected, and double passed the optics to increase resolution. This became the standard of subsequent instruments. We also built the first Gas Phase Raman spectrometer, making a front end, using mercury arc lamps for a commercial ARL Raman spectrophotometer. Our involvement in gas chromatography was early; we built our own systems, following some work done at DuPont. We worked with Fisher Scientific on an early preparative GC, making special columns to up sample loads without losing resolution. Shortly afterwards, working with Aerograph (Wilkens Instrument and Research), we made input in design and implementation on the A70 auto-prep system, which allowed modest quantities of purified samples to be supplied to both analytical and synthetic chemists. We were also involved in bringing computers into the chemical laboratories. In fact, we built a few of our own special computers in the early days. Most of our efforts were spent on the interface between computers and experiments, and courses were taught at Purdue which showed a whole generation of chemists how to automate their experiments. I have always felt that the most significant thing we were involved in was the interface between Professors and students who had needs and manufacturers who made instruments to fill what they thought were needs. By defining the real needs and being willing to take early instruments and using them while working with the manufacturers to fit them to real world use, reduced the headaches for those who followed, and gave our faculty state-of-the-art equipment ahead of the rest of the field. And I do believe this approach made the world a better place.”
Jon’s group was comprised of highly skilled people from a variety of backgrounds, some, like Robert Santini had Ph.D.s in Chemistry, others had E.E. or other degrees. Some of the best people were technicians. The team appeared not to be highly organized. Jon simply asked people to help in particular areas that matched their abilities. Subsequent to Jon’s period of active management the 2 ACS Paragon Plus Environment
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group was run for brief stints by Fred Lytle and Bill Baitinger, then for two decades by Robert Santini, and currently by R. Michael Everly. The size of the group has always been about the same, 15 or so. For some years now it has had oversight over precision machining and glassblowing and in the past it had responsibility for instructional and research computing but this is now centralized. The group now maintains a set of communal instruments that are available for research use throughout the Department. This is a relatively recent development. A long-continuing activity has been equipment repair although changes in manufacturing have decreased demand for this service. The core activity continues to be the design, construction and testing of major new instruments. Recent multi-year projects involved the fabrication of a cryogenic ion spectrometer with the groups of Tim Zwier and Scott McLuckey, and autonomous Arctic measurement buoy platforms with Paul Shepson’s group. Jon spoke often of his mission: to help people solve problems. The interfacing of analytical instruments with computers began in the 1960’s particularly in the group of Malmstadt at the University of Illinois. Jon saw the value of these developments and in the late 60’s he worked with Sam Perone and Harry Pardue on a series of short courses in Electronic Instrumentation that had an enormous effect on the whole field of analytical chemistry. Sam Perone has written about Jon Amy in his memoir ‘Turned On’ he notes “Jon was a giant personality in the field of analytical chemistry, and his presence at Purdue had a huge impact on my career. Many people know the story of how he secured one of the very first Hewlett-Packard computers produced (#2, I was told) so that I could develop that first computer short course at Purdue in 1968. But only those of us who worked with him on a daily basis realized what he did routinely that made it possible to sustain the high level of technology we required. Whether it was waving his magic wand to get cranky instruments to begin purring, or putting us in touch with just the right connection at one of the instrument companies, Jon was an incomparable asset to Purdue Chemistry. And then there was ‘Jon the renaissance man’—well-read, well-traveled, articulate, polished, and ever-ready to play the role of mediator among our colleagues.” Later, Jon saw that the distribution and utilization of instrumentation was being impeded by the lack of technical skills in the sales staffs of instrument companies, so he established a short course on the vocabulary of chemical instrumentation for sales engineers from HP and other companies. Jon worked with the author on a series of short courses in the early 70’s on the then new field of MS/MS. From that experience he grew to know, appreciate and assist in the work of Donald Hunt (U. Virginia, doing experiments that launched the field of proteomics) and Don’s student George Stafford (Thermo Finnigan, just then inventing the mass selective instability scan for ion trap mass spectrometers). Jon’s methods of operation were straightforward as his first encounter with TZ Chu, later the CEO of Finnigan Instruments, shows. Jon wrote “TZ’s first visit to Purdue was his first sales call for Wilkens Instrument & Research. He came to see Herb Brown who was out of town. He was told to go see Jon Amy, [being told] that Herb could never buy anything without his consent. I showed him some of our home made GC’s and a just acquired MS. I made some suggestions on how best to sell the product to Herb Brown and how to make some improvements to the instrument. Then I took him home for dinner and he ended up staying the night, sleeping in the basement. I took him to see Herb the next day and he got an order for two instrument systems and I gained a friend.” TZ has recounted that Jon Amy told him why the instrument wouldn't work, how to fix it, how to sell it to Herb Brown and then took him home for dinner. That was the start of their life-long friendship. Jon Amy was an engineer as much as a chemist, and as an engineer he fought noise. He was very likely the first person to recognize and name a type of noise often encountered but overlooked in earlier eras when spectroscopy of simple single-component solutions was the norm in advanced measurement. This 3 ACS Paragon Plus Environment
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form of noise, chemical noise, is a major limitation in high performance work on complex samples, especially in methods like mass spectrometry where the sample is intimate with the instrument. His pithy wisdom included items like “Tackle the problem, not the symptom”. Summing up the contributions of Jon Amy and his Instrumentation Facility concept, Harry Pardue, former Purdue University analytical chemist and Head of the Chemistry Department, notes that “No other person had more to do with the success of faculty and students in the Department than Jon. He had the foresight to understand very early the importance instrumentation would play in chemical research and teaching. He also had the foresight and skill set to develop a unique group of instrumentation specialists to provide and support the instrumental needs of faculty and students. Jon was a remarkable person whose legacy lives on in the successes of students and faculty who benefited from his kindness, advice and services.” The Purdue Analytical Division in 1984 established the Amy-Mellon Lecture in honor of Jon Amy and an earlier analytical chemist, Guy Mellon. The first Amy-Mellon Lecture was given by esteemed Minnesota electrochemistry Isaak Kolthoff and attended by Guy Mellon. The list of speakers in this Lecture series captures the national scope of research in using and developing analytical instrumentation. Jon Amy passed away on December 4, 2016, three days after attending the 2016 Amy Mellon Lecture given by Jeanne Pemberton of the University of Arizona. Jon Amy 2008 in his favorite position, working on an instrument. Photo courtesy Michael S. Story
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Jon Amy 2000 Photo courtesy Terry Amy
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