Preparations For Spectrometer

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31542, 2 December 1967, Page 14

Preparations For Spectrometer

Dr A. Fischer, reader in chemistry at the University of Canterbury, spent most of 14 months abroad preparing for the arrival of the department’s mass spectrometer, which will be bought with a $76,000 Golden Kiwi Lottery grant The acquisition has been delayed by the economic situation.

Dr Fischer spent 13 month at the new University of Sussex working with Professor Colin Eaborne, who visited Christchurch about two years ago. Sussex has a wellequipped mass-spectroscopy laboratory, including the model which has been ordered for Canterbury. Dr Fischer also took a course at the Manchester factory where the Canterbury machine will be produced. Mass' spectroscopy enabled precise measurement of the mass of charged molecules and fragments of molecules which in turn enabled the identification of unknown chemical substances, said Dr Fischer.

The technique had other wide practical applications, ranging from observation of the assimilation of nitrogen

by plants to examination of the gases in the lungs. The extensive uses of mass spectroscopy therefore ranged from pure chemistry to agriculture and from upperatmosphere research to medicine.

In September Dr Fischer attended the fourth international conference on mass spectroscopy in Berlin, attended by about 400 workers in this specialised field. On his way back through the United States Dr Fischer studied mass-spectroscopy installations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Purdue and Stanford Univerities. The first two, already “fantastically equipped,” had each recently received grants of 5U5750.000 for “additional equipment,” he said. At the University of California at Los Angeles, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and at the Uni-

sversity of Illinois at Urbana Dr Fischer studied teaching and research programmes on mass spectroscopy. “I know a very great deal more about this work than when I went away and we now await our own machine,” said Dr Fischer.