Research Project
3435461
The Analytical Division of the American Chemical Society has asked me to organize the symposium for the August 1990 national meeting to be held in Washington, DC. The title will be "Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome: New Challenges in Analytical Chemistry". The idea is to expose and educate the community of analytical chemists to some of the problems, challenges, and opportunities presented by the Human Genome Initiative (HGI). This appears to be a particularly propitious time to hold such a symposium, for several reasons. First, the field of analytical chemistry is close to unique, in that it has historically been concerned with the development of new technology as a goal within itself. This is in contrast to the situation in most of the biological and chemical sciences, where technology development is generally not considered to be a high priority. Second, the field of analytical to problems in analysis, separation, and purification. The problems presented by HGI are exactly the sort which such a group of researchers would find stimulating and challenging. Third, the HGI, at this time, is primarily a technology development program: that is, we need to develop powerful and effective tools for dissecting and analyzing genomes, from the megabase to the single nucleotide level. Once these tools have been developed, it will be possible to proceed rapidly in applying the new technology to genomic analysis. However, the groups which are most interested in using this map and sequence information, i.e., the medical and biological research communities, do not in general have tremendous expertise (as mentioned above) in the development of such tools. Fourth, the analytical community is in need of new problems to tackle. The problem which played an important role in the development of analytical chemistry as a field were often problems in structural analysis and trace element determination which were effectively addressed in large part decades ago. Although many new methods, particularly in the area of magnetic resonance and optical instrumentation, have been developed, the vast range of interesting new problems presented by the extremely rapid growth in the fields of biotechnology and genetic engineering would be of great interest. And finally, the resources available to scientists under the aegis of HGI, would be of great help to scientists who currently find the funding levels in their classical fields to be severely constrained. Thus, the idea behind the symposium is to help educate the analytical community about HGI, with the idea that this will stimulate their interest in taking on some of its challenges, and thereby help to achieve rapid progress in attaining the goals of HGI.
