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Analytical Chemistry

C&EN at Pittcon

by Rudy M. Baum
March 7, 2005 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 83, Issue 10

The 56th Annual Pittsburgh Conference & Exposition on Analytical Chemistry & Applied Spectroscopy was held last week in Orlando, Fla. I spent three days at Pittcon, along with four C&EN editors and 20,000 other attendees, learning about the latest laboratory instruments and supplies being introduced by a wide range of vendors.

Every chemist's career should include at least one visit to Pittcon. The vast floor of the new Orlando Convention Center was packed with booths ranging from the elaborate and expensive custom-designed displays of the major players in the laboratory instrumentation business to hundreds of small booths of vendors of every device ever needed in a lab. The technical wizardry on display is breathtaking. Today's analytical instrumentation provides chemists with an array of tools for probing atoms, molecules, and macromolecules with unprecedented sensitivity and accuracy, and facilely managing the data generated in those analyses.

C&EN reporters have covered Pittcon since its inception. During my one-year tenure as C&EN's assistant managing editor for science, technology, and education, I was pressed into emergency duty covering the exposition at Pittcon with C&EN London Senior Correspondent Michael Freemantle. Neither of us had ever covered Pittcon before. I remember well a piece of advice from another C&EN reporter: "Wear a pair of very comfortable shoes."

This year's Pittcon team consisted of Senior Correspondent Stu Borman, Senior Editors Mitch Jacoby and Stephen Ritter, and Associate Editor Celia Henry. Their comprehensive report on Pittcon—including an overview by Borman, reports from technical sessions by Jacoby and Henry, and a listing of new instruments by Ritter—will appear in the March 28 issue of C&EN.

For a taste of that coverage, turn to page 45 of this week's issue. You will find a fascinating story by Henry on an ionization method introduced at Pittcon by JEOL. The method is called DART, for direct analysis in real time, and it is coupled to JEOL's AccuTOF time-of-flight mass spectrometer. DART allows you to obtain a mass spectrum from a wide range of samples just by placing the sample in front of the mass spec in the open atmosphere. Henry was able to report this week on the DART advance because reporters had gotten a sneak peek at the technology in early February at JEOL's headquarters in Peabody, Mass.

C&EN has become increasingly involved with many aspects of Pittcon in the past several years. This year, for instance, I moderated the fourth annual C&EN Chemjobs Employment Workshop on the Sunday before the conference started. More than 100 chemists, many of them recent Ph.D.s, attended the workshop to learn about employment opportunities for analytical chemists. C&EN Associate Editor Corinne Marasco discussed the overall job market for chemists; James A. Ferruzzi, vice president for professional services at Right Management Consultants, provided a wealth of practical tips for job seekers; and Andrea Schulz, director of human resources at Albany Molecular Research, gave the employer's perspective in looking for candidates to fill technical positions.

I was also the moderator at a Pittcon tradition, the 28th annual Centcom breakfast, this year sponsored for the first time by C&EN. Before a standing-room-only crowd, three outstanding speakers—Marijn Dekkers, president and CEO of Thermo Electron Corp.; Peter B. Coggins, president of PerkinElmer Life & Analytical Sciences; and Yoshiyasu Harada, president and CEO of JEOL and deputy chairman of the Japanese Analytical Instruments Manufacturers Association—provided insights into where the analytical instruments industry is headed in the coming years.

Dekkers' talk, for example, was titled "Beyond the Box." "We need to think about how we are servicing our customers," he said. "As an industry, we pay too little attention to customer needs beyond delivering to them excellent instruments." Dekkers called for "more integrated analytical systems, enhanced services, and compatibility of software platforms." And, he added, "when we think about integrated systems, we need to think about the workflow in the lab"—from sample prep to carrying out the analysis to making sense of the data.

Thanks for reading.

 

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