Earlier this spring I spent a couple of weeks in the pleasant, vibrant city of Austin, TX, as a guest of the University of Texas. This was part of a semester leave, or sabbatical. Except for keeping up with my responsibilities as Editor, my other life was neglected in favor of thinking, talking to students and faculty at UT, thinking about analytical chemistry, reading, thinking about chemistry, writing, and thinking about analytical chemistry. A lot of midnight oil was consumed. I came home with significant new insights into topics that had eluded me for some time. It was a successful two weeks. Sabbaticals are peculiarly academic things, and I think that a great pity. Many folks, I would guess, don't appreciate the time demands on college and university types, which makes it easy to misunderstand the usefulness of sabbaticals. It sounds like a vacation, getting to do all that thinking. But it's really a vacation from all the things that divert one's attention from doing what academic people are supposed to docomprehend and advance knowledge in one's subject. In trying to resolve complex questions, capturing a vision of new analytical chemistry or of its uses, and studying an unfamiliar subject in the midst of experts on it, the human mind profits from a period of concentrated attention. Do sabbaticals have usefulness for the industrial research or R&D chemist? I think surely they must, although their goals will take on different characters. An analytical laboratory facing tough new problems and in need of new
tools would clearly profit from sponsoring a several-week visit by a laboratory member to a front-line laboratory dealing with ion traps, surface acoustic wave sensors, high-speed capillary electrophoresis, artificial neural networks, near-field microscopy, or microelectrode voltammetry, to name a few examples. All of these help solve analytical chemistry problems of importance to corporate entities, as does the deep understanding that can be obtained about these tools' values, or limitations, by the visitor having the opportunity to study and talk to specialists. I think academic laboratories generally welcome such visits and the relationships that they can build. Managers might think at this point about the negative sides of insightseeking vacations: lost productivity, justification to upper management, breaks in chain of reporting or supervision or development timelines. These are all important, but short-term, issues. Industrial analytical chemistry must continue to invest in expertise on the longer term, and I worry that such investment is lagging. Productivity is very important to the chemical industry. But productivity is a long word, not a short one, and it will mean as much tomorrow as it does today. Perhaps industrial laboratories should make more use of this investmentoriented academic device called a sabbatical.
Analytical Chemistry, Vol. 67, No. 7, April 1, 1995 225 A
