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Let’s Continue To Teach About Building Instruments I
have written before in this space in praise of Instrument Builders (1993, 65, 571 A; 2001, 73, 517 A). In the U.S. and abroad, the communities that build commercial scientific instruments are astute in their calculations that high-quality, reliable analytical chemistry instruments are a valued commodity and that an instrument will draw a market if its capabilities target contemporary needs. As I teach an undergraduate instrumental analysis class this spring, I am reminded of how thoroughly the analytical academic community has accepted what the Instrument Builders offer for sale. We take off-the-shelf analytical instruments as a given, and we rely on their sophistication. That’s a wonderful result in the development of our science, and I have no complaints here about vendors of instruments. However, there was a time when, if you needed an instrument for some measurement, no vendor was available—you always had to build it yourself. And in the course of doing that, you were conscious of potential S/N problems; of schemes exploiting differential amplifiers, frequency modulation, and the like; of where the instrument needed an operational-amplifier component; and, in more recent years, of how a personal computer interacted with the instrument to capture the data. Looking back, it’s possible to see a natural progression in which, gradually and without question, more and more black-box components have been inserted into instrument circuits at the proper places. Components with reliable and predictable functional capabilities thus become part of the Instrument Builders’ wallpaper. As a researcher, you know these elements of instrument design from your undergraduate and graduate analytical chemistry courses. Many analytical chemistry faculties still provide this kind of basic instruction, but in my perception it is an increasingly localized phenomenon.
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The issue above is part of an unending educational question: How should the finite amount of instructional time in undergraduate and graduate courses be attuned to teach the students what will matter the most to the progress of science? I have always advocated that topics not essential for students to function in the modern scientific world be given less and less lecture time—and in the end, none. Should the same be the case for instrument building? Is the chemistry community being lulled by our happy reliance on the highly competent commercial Instrument Builders into forgetting how to build instruments ourselves? There is a generational component here: Are younger analytical chemists (and other younger chemists who contribute to our subdiscipline), who have been taught fewer instrument-building skills, becoming less productive in exploring new measurements—untouched by commercial instrument capabilities—because of a lack of such skills? I hope that I am tilting at windmills here, but I fear that I am not. Subdisciplines in science rise and fall because of the creativity and productivity of their participants. A few years ago, Richard Zare wrote one of these editorials to address a concern about federal funding for instrument design (2000, 72, 5 A); there may be cause for an equal concern rooted in our own teaching. In the long haul, analytical chemists who lack skills to build equipment for measuring chemical phenomena will become less competitive with those who create the phenomena.
© 2006 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
