American Society for Mass Spectrometry: Evolution of a Scientific Society From the beginning, ASMS has had a great impact on the evolution of MS as the
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n June 2002 in Orlando, Florida, the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) celebrated 50 years of organized meetings. ASMS began as an American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM) study committee, Committee E14, which was formed at the third Pittsburgh Conference in 1952. Committee E14 held the first Annual Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics as part of the following year’s Pittsburgh Conference, and thereafter held its own separate meetings, which have grown in attendance to more than 4500. Some authors have been there from the beginning. In 1953, Fred McLafferty presented a paper on identifying volatile atmospheric pollutants (1). This year, McLafferty gave five presentations.
analytical tool that provides more information from less sample than any other technique.
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Genesis ASMS actually originated before the Pittsburgh Conference at a users’ meeting in Pasadena, Calif., in the spring of 1944 with about 10 attendees, hosted by one of the first commercial manufacturers of mass spectrometers, Consolidated Engineering Corp. (CEC). Whether CEC or Westinghouse was the first manufacturer of a commercial mass spectrometer is still debated; however, most consider CEC (founded in 1937 by Herbert Hoover, Jr., son of the 31st president of the United States) the first to actually deliver an instrument. The second user’s meeting occurred in September of the same year during the fall ACS national meeting in New York and coincided with one of the most violent hurricanes seen on the east coast of the United States. By the time CEC held its third meeting in December 1945 in Philadelphia, attendance was up to 37 people representing 10 different companies or organizations. At this meeting, where 5 talks were presented in 2 days, CEC introduced a new electronic computer that could solve 12 simultaneous linear equations. CEC also published the Consolidated Engineering Corporation Mass Spectrometry Group Report, which contained service information and fundamental scientific discoveries involving MS, many of which were later published in peer-reviewed journals. As worries about close cooperation between companies with similar interests began to foster concerns about antitrust violations and more manufacturers of mass spectrometers wanted access to the technical information presented at these meetings, there was a desire, especially on the part of other manufacturers, to allow users of instruments other than CECs to attend these meetings. In 1951, General Electric, which had supplied mass spectrometers for the Manhattan Project, tried to form a
national committee that would hold annual meetings on MS. In January 1952, on the basis of a recommendation made the previous year by E. B. Tucker of American Oil, an ASTM steering committee (chaired by Bill Young of Atlantic Refining) was formed to chart the future of MS meetings. At the third Pittsburgh Conference in 1952, A. G. “Jack” Sharkey, Jr., of the Pittsburgh Energy Research Center chaired three sessions on MS (2). Fredrick L. Mohler, a well-known mass spectrometrist at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), organized a separate MS symposium with 103 attendees (3). ASTM Committee E-14 was voted into existence with Bill Young as its first elected chair; John Hutton of General Electric as secretary; and Jack O’Neal of Shell, Fred Mohler of 628 A
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NBS, Harold Kelly of DuPont, and Harold Wiley of CEC as vice-chairs. That first ASTM Committee E-14 conference was held in conjunction with the 1953 Pittsburgh Conference, but all subsequent conferences alternated from the east coast to the central United States to the west coast (as had the CEC users’ meetings), which facilitated attendance at a time when methods of travel were more restrictive. The Annual Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics is the longest-lasting meeting dedicated to MS. Several other periodic meetings on specific areas of MS were begun. Some of these meetings are still being held, such as the annual Lake Louise Tandem Mass Spectrometry Workshop held every December in Canada and the annual Montreux LC/MS Conference held alternate years since 1983 in the United States and Switzerland, along with a few others. The only other meeting that has a lineage comparable to that of the ASMS Conference is the triennial International Mass Spectrometry Conference (IMSC), which was first held in 1958 and has its origins in two meetings organized by the Institute of Petroleum in Britain in 1950 and 1953. The IMSC has always been held in various European locations, the next of which will be Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2003.
Evolution The ASMS annual conference has grown not only in size and attendance but also in the number of technical presentations. Whereas there were 26 presentations in 4 separate sessions in the first Annual Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics held by Committee E-14, there were >2000 presentations in 6 parallel oral sessions held each morning and afternoon in the 2002 conference held by ASMS. Posters were presented during the time that oral presentations were not being held. In 1976, ASMS began including poster presentations to relieve the time pressure created by the mounting number of technical submissions for the meeting. ASMS also began hosting three annual special-interest meetings. The first was the Fall Workshop, which has included several interesting topics that appeal to specific subsets of the membership. The Fall Workshop began in 1981 with the topic of fast atom bombardment and has been held every year since 1989 in different locations around the United States. In 1987, ASMS became affiliated with the Asilomar Conference on Mass Spectrometry, which was begun in 1980 by Laszlo Tokes, Ron Hass, and Arnie Falick. The meeting, modeled after the Gordon Conference, is held in October in Pacific Grove, Calif., just south of Monterey Bay. The first topic was MS/MS. In 1989, ASMS founded the Sanibel Conference held late each January on Sanibel Island off the gulf coast of Florida. In the early years of Committee E-14, most of its members
were from the petroleum industry. As time passed and MS found its way into many other areas of science, the membership became more diverse and wanted the organization to be more diverse, too. At the 1969 Committee E-14 meeting, the members voted to form ASMS and incorporate it as a nonprofit organization. ASMS was not intended to replace Committee E14 but was to exist in addition to it. The two groups would hold joint meetings, and the chair of Committee E-14 would have an automatic position as a vice president of ASMS. ASMS had three vice presidents responsible for Programs, Arrangements, and Data and Standards, respectively. The vice president of Data and Standards was not elected by the ASMS membership, but was the Committee E-14 chair. In 1974, the ASMS membership changed the role of the Committee E-14 chair to that of a nonelected director-at-large, and in 1986, the ASMS membership voted not to have a member of Committee E-14 as an automatic member of the ASMS Board of Directors. The membership felt that the role of petroleum research in MS (which was the primary purview of Committee E-14) was no greater than that of any other field and, therefore, should not have a position above that of any other interest area. The position was replaced by a member-at-large position for Measurements and Standards to be elected by the membership. The year after the removal of its chair from the ASMS board, ASTM abolished Committee E14’s official standing (4). Since this last major change in the organization of ASMS, the only other change has been the society’s association with the International Mass Spectrometry Society. The president of ASMS is now the representative to the International Society from the United States. The ASMS Board of Directors consists of a vice president for Arrangements; a secretary; a treasurer; and members-at-large for Measurements and Standards, Education, and Publications. These six positions are elected to twoyear terms with the treasurer, member-at-large for Education, and member-at-large for Measurements and Standards elected in one year, and the other three elected in the alternate year. Every other year, a vice president for Programs is elected who, after two years, becomes president. After two years as president, this person serves another two years as immediate pastpresident. In addition to these nine board members, a nonelected executive director (paid staff) is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the society.
istry (5). All subsequent volumes of the proceedings contained a disclaimer stating that the material was for the restricted use of members and was not to be considered a publication, which did not preclude the future publication of the presented material in peer-reviewed journals. The last year of hardcopy publication for the proceedings was 1998. Beginning with the 1999 volume, the proceedings are available only on CD-ROM and distributed in the August or September issue of the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (JASMS). The proceedings from past meetings are still in great demand. Several volumes have appeared on out-ofprint book search sites, such as http://abebooks.com, and all volumes have disappeared in a month or less at prices as high as $100. JASMS has a very high impact factor and is considered one of the top analytical publications under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Michael Gross of Washington University; Associate Editors Veronica Bierbaum, Gary Glish, Kelsey Cook, and Carol Robinson; and a 24member Editorial Board. ASMS has also endeavored to keep its pricing policies reasonable. In 1990, when the society began publishing JASMS, membership dues were $45, which included a subscription. In 2002, dues went to $65, which includes both hardcopy and electronic subscriptions to 12 issues per year and electronic access to the entire archive. In 1990, the library subscription price was $245 for six issues; the current subscription price has risen to only $420 annually. Many areas of science have suffered from a lack of recorded history. This has not been the case with MS, largely due to the efforts of ASMS. When the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) was formed as a joint venture between ACS and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, ASMS was one of the first affiliated organizations. Through a joint effort between ASMS and CHF, a chronology of MS and atomic theory, from the accomplishments of J. J. Thomson and F. W. Aston to the relatively recent developments of MALDI and electrospray, was published (3). This book may not be a definitive history of the field, but it is definitely an outstanding scholarly work and, through the use of parallel time lines of world history and MS achievements, puts the development of MS into a perspective that can be appreciated by scientists and nonscientists alike. This was not ASMS’s first venture into publishing books of historical interest. Beginning in 1999, ASMS arranged to republish books of historical significance. The first was the 1962 McGraw–Hill Series in Advanced Chemistry book entitled
The Annual Conference
on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics is the
longest-lasting meeting dedicated to MS.
Written in our own hand The proceedings of the annual ASTM Committee E-14 Conference were not published until 1961. Little written information is available on the first eight meetings, although a report on the fifth meeting held in 1957 appeared in Analytical Chem-
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Mass Spectrometry: Organic Chemical Applications by Klaus Biemann. The next republished title was Mass Spectrometry and its Application to Organic Chemistry by John Beynon; in 2001, ASMS republished Introduction to Mass Spectrometry by John Roboz. In addition to preserving history, ASMS established two research awards in 1986, which were initially funded by Finnigan and VG Instruments. Today, there are three research awards: one sponsored by Thermo Finnigan; one by Applied Biosystems; and one by Micromass, a subsidiary of Waters. These $25,000 awards “promote academic research by young scientists” in MS. In 1988, the society established the ASMS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Mass Spectrometry, which recognizes “a focused, singular achievement” in MS. In 1994, the Biemann Medal was established, which recognizes “a significant achievement in basic or applied MS made by an individual early in his or her career.”
Showing the wares The weekend before each ASMS annual meeting is filled with events hosted by all the major instrument manufacturers. Many companies have picked these user forums over the traditional Pittsburgh Conference venue to introduce their new products. Two-day short courses organized by ASMS are also available at very reasonable prices, covering fundamentals such as interpretation of electron ionization spectra and advanced topics such as characterization of proteins. Another significant event was the introduction of a commercial exposition in 2000. From the beginning, the conference was maintained as only a scholarly event. As such, ASMS governance restricted the display of equipment and instruments, which actually lifted a great burden from the instrument manufacturers. It was much easier to provide literature and light libations than instruments that, especially in the early days, weighed thousands of pounds and took up a lot of floor space. However, companies that manufactured small related items, such as replacement parts and software, became involved with the conference, which led to a rule that anything that could be hand-carried by one person could be shown. This rule soon had to be reexamined because companies pushed its limits by employing linebackers from professional football teams to carry instruments into hotels. The rule was then modified to exclude items that required vacuum or pressure. Even this got stretched. When Varian introduced its first Saturn instrument, they installed it in their suite, fully functioning. Unfortunately, the instrument was plugged into a socket controlled by a wall switch on the other side of the room— when anyone pressed against it, turning off the switch, the instrument would vent. At the 1972 meeting, there were 20 corporate members. The 2002 list of corporate members consisted of >100 compa630 A
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nies, with several signing up after the final program had gone to press. The concept of dropping by at least four or five suites each night for a drink during the conference and visiting all the manufacturers you were interested in has long passed. In the 1990s, many of the smaller companies found the increasing cost of food and beverages at these hospitality suites prohibitive. For some companies, the remote locations of the hospitality suites within a hotel meant less foot traffic, which did not warrant the expense of a suite. A more formal venue was long overdue. Today, each company is now limited to one 10-ft booth located on the perimeter of the poster session, making for a lesscrowded exhibit and giving all companies equal footing. Some companies, especially the larger ones, have chosen to continue sponsoring hospitality suites. Under present rules, companies can have a corporate poster in a special area for scientific posters or in a booth. This restriction is due solely to space limitations. Only available space and company desire limit hospitality suites. As of 2002, the society has ~5200 members. The conference has grown by better than 10% per year, and ASMS governance has done an outstanding job of managing that growth without diluting the science. The past 50 years have seen the development of several new types of analyzers (quadrupole ion traps, transmission quadrupoles, time-of-flight instruments, and FTMS instruments); GC/MS and LC/MS; many new ionization techniques (electrospray, fast atom bombardment, MALDI, chemical ionization, and laser and 252Cf desorption); and the use of surface analysis, imaging, and inductively coupled plasma for inorganic analyses. No one knows what the next 50 years will bring for MS, but one thing is sure: Fifty years from now there will be an Annual Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics with the best and brightest of that generation’s scientists in attendance. O. David Sparkman is an adjunct professor at the University of the Pacific, an ACS short course instructor, and a consultant. His research interests include applications of LC/MS and GC/MS. Address correspondence about this article to him at 5354 Thunderbird Ct., Antioch, CA 94531 (
[email protected]).
References (1) (2) (3)
(4) (5)
Anal. Chem. 1953, 25, 359. Anal. Chem. 1952, 24, 427–429. Grayson, M. A. Measuring Mass: From Positive Rays to Proteins; American Society for Mass Spectrometry and the Chemical Heritage Foundation: Philadelphia, PA, 2002; p 134. Proceedings of the ASMS Annual Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics, 1972–1998. Anal. Chem. 1957, 29, 1377–1383.
