Letters
…getting pleasure from reading
the obituaries…
Archaeological
Analog
Richard Mertens’s article, “Deep
into the Landscape” (February/03), describing
archaeological explorations in the Amuq Valley was fascinating.
I was struck especially by one quotation from Jesse Casana,
AM’00: “It’s fast and dirty and cheap.
We can go out there and in a few weeks find stuff that
challenges conventional wisdom. We find a ton of things
that people never knew existed.”
Doing research in the mass spectrometry
of organic compounds when the field was in its infancy,
starting in 1946, I have had occasion to summarize my
early experience, exploring the chemistry induced by electron
impact on isolated molecules in the mass spectrometer,
in much the same language used by Casana.
In the 1986 paper “Reminiscences
of the Early Days of Mass Spectrometry in the Petroleum
Industry” I wrote: “Because so very little
was known at the time I started, my choice of specific
problems to address or of specific compounds to work with
was wide open. Under the circumstances, I was able to
take the easy and economical route of formulating problems
for investigation to take advantage of available compounds,
whatever their source. This approach amounts to attacking
a huge jigsaw puzzle by making many independent starts
wherever one can spot a few pieces to fit together and
hoping that connecting links will turn up once enough
small portions have been assembled. In fact, between work
in our laboratory and elsewhere, this is precisely the
way the field has developed.” After our first few
publications I started receiving frequent requests from
academic researchers for help with mass spectrometry,
especially isotopic analysis of organic compounds containing
one or more isotopic labels. Working with these materials,
I found that virtually every new spectrum of a labeled
compound yielded more surprises. Thus we also found “a
ton of things that people never knew existed.”
I would expect that people working
in relatively unexplored areas in other fields would have
similar experiences.
Seymour Meyerson, SB’38
Asheville, North Carolina
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