FOCUS about topics of interest. ALMA meetings bring academic, industrial, government, and contract lab managers together in a forum at which common problems can be discussed. Instrument company representatives also attend ALMA meetings to monitor the pulse of the market and to touch base with lab managers, many of whom have sign-off authority on major instrument purchases. ALMA members have so far steered clear of evaluating specific commercial instruments and vendor service policies at meeting sessions, although the concept has been considered. On a person-to-person level, however, t h e ALMA national meeting is certainly a place where comparisons are made and brand names are named. In an era in which scientific instrumentation at college and university campuses is frequently past its prime, a serious concern of academia-based ALMA members involves the "care and feeding" of instruments. One university instrument facility manager explained his dilemma as follows: "A lot of people envy me for having been so successful at getting new instrumentation into my group. But that success comes at the price of not being able to
maintain it properly. We have to hire qualified people, in many cases Ph.D.s, to maintain, operate, and provide analytical support for all this major instrumentation. But the university is finding it increasingly difficult to put these people on hard money [university payroll], and I'm forced to recover salaries through soft money [government grants]. The faculty says we can't request money for instrumentation use in our grants because what the grant agencies are then going to do is to delete a postdoc from the grant and put the savings into instrument maintenance. Money will be shifted within the grant, and the total sum will remain the same." Another conferee suggested t h a t granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation might be willing to support five-year service contracts along with new instrumentation purchase grants. Many others, however, seemed to feel that this would not be a cost-effective solution to the problem. As one lab manager put it, "For less money than it costs to buy service contracts for all my scientific instrumentation, I can run my entire group, which not only provides analytical services but already supports the instrumenta-
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tion at a 95% up rate." Another attendee agreed that dependence on service contracts is less desirable than having knowledgeable staff on hand to respond to problems. "I don't think the service contract is the answer," he said. "I think you have to have an honest and respected discipline that corresponds to understanding the instrument. Unfortunately, the academic community doesn't respect that discipline at this point." In a later discussion on the recruitment and training of technical personnel, the relative merits of hiring chemists at different degree levels was a subject for lively debate. Hiring bachelorlevel chemists is certainly more costeffective, but questions remain about how to motivate them properly in light of the severely limited promotion opportunities for B.S. chemists in most companies. One proposed solution was to liberalize such limitations in recognition of the fact that an exceptional B.S. employee may be working at a de facto Ph.D. level after several years of intensive laboratory experience. In hiring new employees, the needs of the prospective employee must be matched to the needs of the organization. One lab manager recounted a recent choice he had to make between two excellent candidates. "They were both very enthusiastic," he said, "and it was a very difficult decision. Ours is a service laboratory, and I asked myself, Which individual would be better suited to that environment? As it turned out, I didn't hire the person who I thought was the better of the two because I didn't think he would have been happy. He was a real research type of person. If you're not in an R&D environment, you have to be careful who you hire. You have to suit the personality to the job, and that's always a very, very difficult thing to do." Another manager replied that he thought this was one area in which academia had failed. "Ninety percent of the people who come out of the university environment are going to do applications-oriented work," he said. "And the people who are their mentors in the university are doing them a disservice by not telling them that. They promote the full professorship as the epitome of human existence. That might be so for some people. We find it is best to be honest with new recruits, telling them that in a service lab like ours, the first priority is to deliver the product." Next year's ALMA meeting is scheduled to be held in Detroit, Mich. For more information about the organization, write ALMA, c/o R. F. Stalzer, P.O. Box 258, Montchanin, Del. 19710 (302-571-8216). Stu Rorman
