Waters Symposium: Immunoassay
The Annual James L. Waters Symposium at Pittcon The objectives of the annual James L. Waters Symposium at Pittcon are different from those of other symposia at either Pittcon or other conferences. Waters, founder of the well-known Waters Associates, Inc., and currently president of Waters Business Systems, Inc., arranged with the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh (SACP) in 1989 to offer an annual symposium at Pittcon to explore the origins, development, and commercialization of scientific instrumentation of established and major significance. The main goals were and still are to ensure that the early history of this cooperative process be preserved, to stress the importance of contributions of workers with diverse backgrounds, objectives and perspectives, and to recognize some of the pioneers and leaders in the field. Important benefits of these symposia are creation of awareness of the way in which important new instruments and, through them, new fields are created, and promotion of interchange among inventor, development engineer, entrepreneur, and marketing organization. The topics of the first eight Waters Symposia, beginning in 1990, were gas chromatography, atomic absorption spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, high-performance liquid chromatography, ion-selective electrodes, and lasers in chemistry. Publication of the papers presented at the Waters Symposia is a high priority of the SACP. The papers of the first symposium
were published in LC.GC Magazine and those of the next four symposia appeared in Analytical Chemistry. The next three Waters Symposia were published in this Journal: the sixth, on high-performance liquid chromatography, appeared in the January 1997 issue (pages 37–48); the seventh, on ion selective electrodes, appeared in the February 1997 issue (pages 159–182); the eighth, on lasers in chemistry, was featured in the May 1998 issue (pages 555–570). The topic of the ninth Waters Symposium, held in March 1998, was immunoassay, and is featured in this issue of the Journal. In the first paper, Nobel Laureate Rosalyn Yalow describes the insights that allowed her and Solomon Berson to invent the radioimmunoassay (RIA) method for insulin. In a complementary paper, Roger Ekins critically reviews his own work along parallel lines, and the work of others, that led to a wide variety of ligand-binding assay techniques, including the most recent ultrasensitive microarrays on a chip. The development of a variety of homogeneous immunoassays is described by Edwin Ullman in the third paper, followed by a discussion by Eugene Straus of an important application of RIA, namely, the assay of gastrointestinal hormones. Finally, Anders Weber points out the factors to be considered in technology transfer from research to the rapidly growing diagnostics industry. J. F. Coetzee University of Pittsburgh Waters Symposium Coordinator
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 76 No. 6 June 1999 • Journal of Chemical Education
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