Off to Albemarle Street again last week, to hear Carol Robinson tell us about her adventures in the land of mass spectroscopy.
Being a little early, I took a stroll around the area, with the first item of note being Asprey's, where I could buy one of the suitcases illustrated left. Now as it happens I had a long and happy relationship with a company of suitcase makers called Globetrotter, starting around 45 years ago, that is to say when Globetrotter was still a brand to be reckoned with, the suitcase of choice for civilian flight crews. And they were still turning up at car boots sales when we arrived at Epsom. But at about that time the brand took a nose dive: while the suitcases looked much the same, the quality of the materials was not and they no longer wore at all well, which did not do, given that they were still expensive. I think the brand is now more or less dead, but these suitcases from Asprey's look very similar indeed. Perhaps they bought Globetrotter up and luxurified their products; added the trimmings which converted hard wearing & practical travel goods (work goods in my case), into luxury items for people who like to flaunt their money in airport lounges.
The second item of note were the bells, properly the Atkinson's carillon, up until this point occasionally seen but never heard. Carilling away very cheerfully, perhaps to mark the fact that it was 1900.
The lecture hall was as full as usual, with one rather incongruous couple, not particularly young, turning up in an approximation to full-dress punk gear.
Robinson, aka Dame Carol Robinson, started out by telling us of some of the former scientists who had lectured from the very desk that she was lecturing from, an eminent line which included, as well as Faraday, her own doctoral supervisor and her supervisor's supervisor. She also explained that having started out with mass spectroscopy when she left school at 16 to become a laboratory technician, she never really left. Not only that, she managed what I imagine is the unusual feat of climbing back into the front seat of research after taking an eight year career break to have a family. An entertaining and engaging speaker, who did not stand on the dignity of her professional eminence. She also had the manners to include small mug shots of lots of her team - many of whom were there - in her visuals.
She explained that her career had been a successful punt on what had seemed to others to be an unlikely field - using mass spectroscopy to look at large molecules - proteins and such like - rather than the very much smaller - by orders of magnitude - molecules which the machinery had been used on up until that point. But she wanted to be in a field where she had a chance of making an impact, rather than some established but heavily populated field in which it would be hard to stand out from the crowd. A punt which has, in the event, paid off handsomely.
At which point my very limited knowledge of mass spectroscopy began to break down. I thought the idea was to take a small sample of whatever it was you wanted to analyse, to heat it up to the point where it broke into its constituent elements and then to squirt the resultant ions through an electrical contraption which measured the mass charge ratio of the ions, plotting the result as something which looked very like the sort of thing you got from light spectroscopy. The next post gives an example. And with a bit of experience you could say what all the peaks were, add them all up and so say what it was you started with.
It seems that things are a lot more complicated than that, and apart from the difficulty of converting samples into a spray of bits small enough to work in the spectroscope without completely destroying it, the idea now seems to be to observe how the process breaks these large molecule into chunks, chunks which result in tell-tale signatures on the spectrograph. Chunks which tell you something about the three dimensional structure of the large molecule - typically a very long chain folded up into something three dimensional and very complicated. Structure rather than analysis is the object of the exercise. I think the sort of thing you might get here is shown at the next but one post. One rather striking visual was of a molecule which looked and behaved rather like a spinning top and was something to do with supplying energy to or from a cell.
It would have been interesting to have been told something about how much all this equipment cost - say compared to the scanners used in hospitals - and about what sort of skill sets the teams using it needed to deploy. Did they need plumbers, electricians and statisticians - as well as biologists? As so often, this did not occur to me until too late.
The chap next to me was another tourist, rather than a scientist, and it turned out that he worked on customer surveys for investment banks, polling their clients to see if they were getting the service and products they wanted. Not altogether what sort of surveys these were, as the sort of technical issues which used to vex the Government Social Survey in the days when I sat on the floor above them, did not seem to be the sort of thing that vexed his working day.
Passed a big pile of 'City' and 'Country Life' magazines on the way back to the tube, very roughly his and hers magazines for the waiting room of a fancy dentist or the lounge of a fancy hotel. The former was rather brash and included a lot of advertisements for expensive toys and for expensive property. I learned that you can, for example, spend as much on a large flat in docklands as on a small country house in the outer home counties. Say a small number of millions. The latter was more genteel, with the riches not quite so obviously nouveaux.
Tried the aeroplane game at Clapham Junction, more or less under the flight path, but was more or less defeated by low flying cloud. Managed a lowly one in a hole in the cloud before my train came - the trouble with holes in the cloud being that you had to be looking right at them when the plane went over, and this being the first time I had played the Junction for a while, I did not know where to look.
Champion snorer in the compartment next to me, otherwise full of a French family. Several of us wondered whether to wake him at Epsom but did not, partly in my case because the last time I did such a thing, the sleeper concerned was going to the end of the line at Dorking, I used to find that some sort of internal clock usually woke one up at the right place, but perhaps commuters who wish to sleep after after work beverages should be encouraged to hang a luggage label around their necks so that concerned passers-by know whether to wake them up or not. Perhaps one day I shall fake it to see what happens; if nothing else it would make a change from the aeroplane game.
Reference 1:
http://robinsonweb.chem.ox.ac.uk/. Despite which it seems that Dame Carol is actually a professor at Cambridge.
Group search key: msa
