Perspectives on the FUTURE OF ANALYTICAL MASS SPECTROMETRY

Abstract

So read a billboard leading to the new city of Oak Ridge, TN, in late 1942. In direct contrast to the spirit of the "secret city" of the early 1940s Manhattan Project, attendees of the 43rd Annual Summer Symposium on Analytical Chemistry gathered July 24-27, 1990, to openly discuss the current and future directions of the rapidly growing field of analytical mass spectrometry (MS). The last summer symposium to feature analytical MS was held in 1981; it was time, therefore, to compare progress notes gathered over the past nine years and to focus once again on what has proven to be an active and exciting area of analytical chemistry.The symposium was hosted by W. D."Dub" Shults, director of the Division of Analytical Chemistry at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)-the only division of its kind in the national labs-and chaired by Dave Donohue, also from ORNL. Active participation from the audience throughout the sym-posium was encouraged by program chair Graham Cooks of Purdue University, thus setting an atmosphere for the free exchange of ideas. The oral sessions commenced with a marathon Wednesday, reminiscent of the 24-hour-per-day pace of the early physicists of Oak Ridge; three sessions ran from 8:30 A.M. to 10:30 P.M., testing the stamina of experts and neophytes alike. Wednesday's sessions, coupled with those on Friday, amounted to 27 invited talks along with six submitted posters and a special graduate student session on Thursday. (Details of the symposium program can be found in the April 1,1990, issue of ANALYTICAL Chemistry.)In keeping with the theme of the fu-Perspectives on the FUTURE OF ANALYTICAL MASS SPECTROMETRY