editorial
Shared Experimental Infrastructures
W
ithin most universities and especially research universities, there are numerous shared instrumentation facilities. These also exist widely within industrial and government laboratories, where rationales for their formation may be different from universities, but the general ideas are similar. These shared sites in universities are commonly called “core facilities” and represent efforts by major units such as Schools of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to make modern equipment available for faculty and graduate student research. Core facilities can be crucial elements of carrying out front line research projects by making the most modern and capable instruments available for relevant measurements. The equipment in core facilities is generally of the very expensive kind, difficult for faculty to justify for their own individual laboratories, and is generally an instrument on which important experiments can be performed in fractions of the available instrument operating time. The latter aspect means that timesharing with other faculty yields benefits in terms of reducing capital outlay per faculty group. The experiments may be carried out by students and postdoctoralsOafter appropriate trainingOand/or by professional staff who understand the equipment better than most and watch after the proper maintenance and care of expensive hardware. Sometimes the faculty using a core facility instrument have incomplete proficiency in how it works, so they rely on the technical staff to see that the experiment is properly done, allowing the faculty member to focus on the interpretation only. These factors are similar, I believe, for academic and non-academic facilities. For chemists and their close kin (in materials, polymer, and biosciences), instruments commonly found in core facilities are NMR spectrometers, mass spectrometers, Raman spectrometers and microscopes, transmission and Auger electron microscopes, X-ray diffraction spectrometers, lithographic equipment, and X-ray and Auger photoelectron spectrometers. Smaller instruments such as chromatographs, potentiostats, and surface profilometers are not common in core facilities because their costs are such that individual investigators can acquire them for individual labs. Serious potential pitfalls exist in forming a core facility. These include poor choice of the particular instrument purchased (i.e., it does not meet the actual measurement require-
10.1021/AC902246E 2009 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
Published on Web 10/12/2009
ments of numerous users, which can sometimes come to light only after the purchase and initial use). Another pitfall is inadequate planning for maintenance and upkeep, often rooted in inadequate (or less than fully competent) technical staffing, which results in premature decay in instrument performance. Yet another problem is reluctance of core facility directors to recognize the educational aspects of research by refusing to train student operators. I have seen examples of all of these potholes at my own institution and at others; they are, of course, undesirable. Decisions on creating core facilities should be community based to gain the widest possible perspective (and relevant specifications) and to yield the widest possible common good. Further, good facility decisions come at the edge of a new generation of commercially-available instrument capability, producing an advantage for the researchers in that institution. For that reason, faculty try to keep abreast of what equipment is in the instrument designers’ and vendors’ pipelines. It is not uncommon to find regular use of core facilities not just by different segments of an institution (company or university), but also by people at other institutions. Such “outside services” usually involve use fees higher than intra-institutional fees and are a lower priority for instrument time than internal users out of consideration for the institution’s internal subsidy of the facility costs. The outside users are normally engaged in a research activity; for example, regular quality control testing of a commercial product, which lacks educational or research value, is rarely supported in this way. Core facilities are a vital part of measurement science activities and are a service to a very wide range of research endeavors. They are complex entities, and their continuing quality operation requires continued attention to the benefits being produced (e.g., are they declining and why?) and to the modernity of the available instruments.
NOVEMBER 1, 2009 / ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY
8655
