Pleasantly honest seminar
Jun 8th 2006Wallabynerd alert
Today was about the last seminar of spring — the department’s seminar series packs up over the summer. Dr. Andreas Manz of the Insitute for Analytical Sciences described his group’s work over the past dozen years or so on miniaturizing analytical techniques, including the (now common stuff like) electrophoresis, but also much more interesting applications of a mixer chip. The really fun part of analytical chemistry is not so much *what* gets measured; it’s how it’s done. I mostly faked the interest in bone for my thesis; well, not faked, it *is* an interesting material, but it’s an interesting material because of its complexity, and because that complexity makes it difficult to analyze. I built an instrument to analyze it in a certain way, and now I’m more than happy to see another student do all the boring repeated uses of it to actually extract useful conclusions from bone.
Getting back to the title and the seminar. Most analytical chemistry seminars, for those who haven’t been to one, are about some particular technique or other — NMR, perhaps, or HPLC, or mass spec. (Far too much on mass spec, honestly.) Most of them focus on progress in fundamental understanding of some detail of the procedure — pulse sequences or stationary phases or electrospray versus MALDI; these are the ones that put most people to sleep. Otherwise, they focus on some particular application — detecting explosives, for instance. Those talks are only as interesting as the application itself.
Dr. Manz’s talk today was very delicately balanced between describing a broad range of techniques and how they were used; the real emphasis was on how analytical chemistry ought to be focused on expanding our ability to collect information: more detailed information, faster collection, and higher spatial resolution. Everything else is a detail to be “fixed”, and then move on to the next improvement. At one point during the questions, his answer was — only slightly less blunt — “That’s not analytical. It’s interesting, but it’s not analytical chemistry. We don’t care about that.”
Of course the details are important too — a new idea for the best technique ever doesn’t do anybody any good without the effort to make it really possible. But after three years now of feeling like an analytical chemist in biomedical engineer’s clothing — well, it was a very refreshing change. 
And now… well, now I get to spend the next year pretending to care about optics as a postdoc. Hopefully I can find a way to slip some sort of analytical slant into it…