The objectives of the annual James L. Waters Symposium at Pittcon are different from those of
other symposia at either Pittcon or other conferences. Waters, founder of the well-known Waters
Associates, Inc., and currently president of Waters Business Systems, Inc., arranged with the
Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh (SACP) in 1989 to offer an annual symposium at
Pittcon to explore the origins, development, and commercialization of scientific instrumentation
of established and major significance. The main goals were and still are to ensure that the early
history of this cooperative process be preserved, to stress the importance of contributions of
workers with diverse backgrounds, objectives and perspectives, and to recognize some of the
pioneers and leaders in the field. Important benefits of these symposia are creation of awareness
of the way in which important new instruments and, through them, new fields are created, and
promotion of interchange among inventor, development engineer, entrepreneur, and marketing
organization. The topics of the first eight Waters Symposia, beginning in 1990, were gas
chromatography, atomic absorption spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance
spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, high-performance liquid chromatography, ion-selective electrodes,
and lasers in chemistry. Publication of the papers presented at the Waters Symposia is a high
priority of the SACP. The papers of the first symposium were published in LC.GC Magazine and those
of the next four symposia appeared in Analytical Chemistry. The next three Waters Symposia were
published in this Journal: the sixth, on high-performance
liquid chromatography, appeared in the January 1997 issue (pages 37-48);
the seventh, on ion selective electrodes, appeared
in the February 1997 issue (pages 159-182); the
eighth, on lasers in chemistry, was featured in the May 1998 issue (pages 555-570).
The topic of the ninth Waters Symposium, held in March 1998, was immunoassay, and is featured
in this issue of the Journal. In the first paper, Nobel Laureate Rosalyn Yalow describes the
insights that allowed her and Solomon Berson to invent the radioimmunoassay
(RIA) method for insulin. In a complementary paper, Roger Ekins critically
reviews his own work along parallel lines, and the work of others, that led to a wide variety of ligand-binding assay
techniques, including the most recent ultrasensitive microarrays on a chip. The development of a
variety of homogeneous immunoassays is described by Edwin Ullman in the third paper,
followed by a
discussion by Eugene Straus of an important application of RIA, namely, the assay of gastrointestinal
hormones. Finally, Anders Weber points out the factors to be considered in technology transfer from
research to the rapidly growing diagnostics industry.
Our Secondary School editors work hard to distill all the JCE materials to produce a fraction of particular interest to high school teachers. We call it CLIC.
In recent years we have worked hard to better match our advertisers with our readers. When shopping for chemistry education materials, visit our advertisers' WWW sites first.
Take JCE along on your outreach missions. Copies of the Journal, guest access to JCE Online, our publications catalog, and more are available for your participants.
