Editorial. Analytical Chemistry as an Academic ... - ACS Publications

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A NAL'rrTICAI.. CHEMISTRV July 1967, Vol. 39, No.8

EDITORIAL

Editor: HERBERT A. LAITINEN EDITORIAL HEADQUARTERS Wahmgton, D . C. 20036 1155 Sixteenth St., N.W. Phone: 202-737-3337 Teletype WA 23 Asrociate Editor: John K. 'Crum Arsutant Editors: Josephine Pechan, Virginia E. Stewart Editorial Assistants: Ellen. J. Caldwell, Lois E. Schrmtt Contributing Editor: R. H. Muller Director of Design: Joseph Jacoba Production Staff-Washington: Production Manager: Bacil Guiley Art and Layout:

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Analytical Chemistry as an Academic DiscipIine N THIS MONTH'S

Editors' Column, some of the opening remarks by

I Professor Joseph Jordan, General Chairman of the 1967 Analytical

Summer Symposium, are quoted. The irony of the tendency to deemphasize analytical chemistry in American graduate curricula in the face of strengthening this specialty in a number of European countries, and in the face of increasing demands by industry for Ph.D. analytical chemists relative to other types of chemists is pointed out. At the undergraduate level, analytical chemistry faces a danger from a lamentable tendency in some circles to denigrate the importance of laboratory work, especially advanced and quantitative work. While it is true that we should be seeking the most efficient ways of presenting laboratory instruction, we should avoid the traps of shortchanging our students' laboratory experience on one extreme, and creating a discouragingly intensive curriculum on the other. Some who show concern about overintensiveness in laboratory instruction seem oblivious to similar dangers in theoretical courses. At the graduate level, analytical chemistry is destined to be a minority specialty, and in an academic democracy it cannot survive unless chemists of other persuasions are sympathetic to its welfare. A vast majority of chemists will admit that analytical chemistry plays an important role in experimental chemical research. But too many maintain that it plays only a supportive or service role, and that it is not a vital research area in its own right. These are the chemists who regard instruments as machines that accept samples and provide data, and who do not concern themselves with the education of chemists for the design of instruments or, what is more important, the validification of measurements made with them. They tend to define analytical research out of existence by accepting all that is fundamental into other branches of chemistry and rejecting all that is applied. As far as industry is concerned, there is no doubt that the laboratories getting the greatest benefits from analytical chemistry are those that accept it into partnership with other branches of chemistry and assign i t a responsibility of keeping up to date by means of basic research. Those individuals or laboratories that relegate the analytical laboratory to a purely service role can, as a natural consequence, be expected to have the greatest reason for complaints about that service. The situation can be summarized in the statement that a professionally healthy analytical department accepts problems, not samples. Sampling is a part of the analytical operation, and the sample is the means to the end. There are many other facets to the complex problem of the status of analytical chemistry in academic institutions and in industry. These will be explored from time to time in future editorials.

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For submission of manuscripts, see page 2 A . VOL. 39, NO. 8, JULY 1967

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