Please join us next Wednesday, November 13, at 2 pm for a Geochemistry seminar by Dr. William F. McDonough, a Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, in the geology department and is affiliated with the Department of Earth Sciences and Research Center for Neutrino Science, and Tohoku University, Sendai, JAPAN.
The talk “I didn’t know you could do that” will be held in person in the Comer Seminar room (1st floor).
I didn’t know you could do that
When I started out in the mass spectrometry business, I didn’t have any useful background (undergraduate degree in anthropology). However, by the end of my PhD, I was pretty good at analyzing samples on a thermal ionization mass spectrometer (TIMS). During my post-doc I worked on a 1960’s spark source mass spectrometer, where we accumulated spectra on photo-plates, read these plates with a densitometer and entered data into key punch cards. When we started our own lab, we bought bits and pieces, put them together, and built a laser ablation beam delivery system that we attached to a primitive, 2nd generation ICP-MS (inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer). Ignorance was an advantage, and nobody told us what we could and could not do. Gradually, we learned how to make things by calling our friends and asking lots of questions. The best two things that happened (1) we had good friends, and (2) we got a lot of money to start out with.
We were not entirely stupid, but we were naïve. That helps a lot. I’ll review our absolutely fun 30-year journey with LA-ICP-MS, highlighting accomplishments made by our team. Although we are geochemists, we ended up working on nuclear forensic, cutting-edge geochemistry, whodunit poisoning stories, environmental pollution, and getting ready for doing LA-ICP-MS analyses on the Moon – yup, we are again building and designing a new instrument.
