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Copyright © 2006 California Separation Science Society. All Rights Reserved.
The California Separation Science Society (CASSS), is a not-for-profit chromatography discussion group serving separation scientists in California. The purpose of the society is to provide a professional forum for the dissemination of information and technology regarding separation science. CASSS sponsors numerous one-day symposia focused on particular areas of separation science. Several dinner discussion group meetings are held annually in order to address more general topics in analytical chemistry and to provide further networking opportunities. In addition, CASSS sponsors several international symposia and provides student travel grants to many such symposia. Volunteers from the Board of Directors and the CASSS business office implement these programs.
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Those
who read my letters regularly know that I typically use them to describe
my impressions from conferences and write them on board an airplane
while flying home. Indeed, it is easy to do so since I am always full of
impressions and I just need to type them down. Today, I am going to make
an exception to this rule and write about a completely different thing.
I found two papers recently that caught my attention. The first one
entitled The convergence of synthetic organic and polymer chemistry
published in Science (309, 1200-1205, 2005) was written by my friends,
Craig Hawker and Karen Wooley. The second was an Editorial in Analytical
Chemistry (77, 277A, 2005) entitled “Enabling monoliths” written by
Royce Murray. Obviously, the latter was a music for my ears but the
former was not uninteresting either. They both had one thing in common.
They indicate that the “classical” sciences do not exist within their
demarcated borders any longer and most of the happenings are found at
the interfaces of various fields. Thus for example, methods of “pure”
organic chemistry are being used for the creation of polymers defined in
a way that would not be possible using means typical of “classical”
polymer chemistry. These polymers then exhibit completely new properties
and can be used in applications hard to envision by polymer chemists
let’s say 20 years ago. Similarly, the perfect marriage of polymer
chemistry and chromatography enabled the invention of monolithic columns
in the late 1980s that now appear to be one of the hot topics in
separation science. Sure, I was present at the cradle of this
development but this is just an accident. Many other people could invent
the same material as well. They did not, perhaps by an accident, yet
this could happen. Why do I mention this? Well, I can see that CASSS is
the pot where the diversity of various approaches, people and sciences
melts together. Obviously, we meet several times each year and we com
from a variety of fields. We speak to each other, we find common ground,
and we discuss matters at our meetings. Is that not the way to
cross-pollinate as mentioned above? Yes, it is! And this is certainly
one of the missions CASSS fulfills. Believe me, I am so happy to see
this happen.
