e d i to ri a l
Letters from Chicago
H
owdy, Reader. I’m in this big Windy City called Chicaaago where the weather is kind of bad and at this time of the year the airplanes may not fly. I came to check out that meeting of analytical chemists called Pittcon—which I guess means someone named Pitt got conned. Anyway, there’s an awful lot of other folks here in spite of the weather, and I hear them saying—pretty consistently—that this is a great meeting in spite of the @#$%^&UU* weather. I’d go along with that, from what I have seen in this big box building called Macawmak (or something like that) where the analytical instruments are showed and the talks are given. The analytical instruments are the ones that really work, and the talks are by folks who seem to know what they are doing and are awfully sincere. Sincerity really counts. Bye now. THE HICK FROM NORTH CAROLINA
My Dear Old America Neighbors: I have journeyed by horse carriage from my North Carolina residence to a place called Chicago. It is truly a metropolis and is in the state of Illinois. I witnessed here the great scientific convention called Pittcon. It is an amazing sight: the meeting place for the convention is a giant flat barn called McCormick that goes on and on like the great prairies of Kansas. The barn was filled with folks in white raincoats (I guess they were worried about the big barn leaking). There were some smaller barns inside the big barn, full of inviting chairs and road shows (somebody called the shows PowerPoints), and casual gentlemen and ladies spoke erudite words that were a bit beyond what I teach in my Old America science class back at a place called High Hill, N.C. There seemed to be some quarrying experiments involving microchips and valves, as well as horseless carriages that used patch clamps and excitons, to restrain the
© 2007 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
horses, I guess. There were other words that I, from Old America, was amazed by—nanowires, Poisson, butted detectors (sounded a bit racy), zeptomole, cytometry—as possibly from a future world. Well, since I’d not gone to Pittcon in many decades, I guess that science really does progress, and new words as well as ideas are invented. A meeting in this big box seemed an apt place to have them aired. YOUR HUMBLE SERVANT FROM NORTH CAROLINA To Today’s Analytical Chemists: I want to thank the Pittcon ’07 organization for another fine instrument show and scientific program. My colleagues from Old America and untutored America agree. Lots of folks (correctly) complained about weather-related travel, but the truth is that Pittcon was in Chicago this February because of Katrina, so let’s accept fate and move on and do great science. From my own observations, that is what happened. The scientific program was well above average. The continued emergence of bioanalytical chemistry, which we see in Analytical Chemistry (the journal), was mirrored in the meeting programming, especially the topflight Adams and Reilley Awards Symposia. I also took note of how the students in the audiences were more and more frequently asking questions after the talks. My experience has been that students’ questions expose the deficiencies of speakers in making their topic clear. I encourage students to keep up the questions. I came home from this meeting with a Great Feeling about analytical chemistry as a discipline. THE EDITOR
A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 7 / A N A LY T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y
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