Not a Synthesis Blog

I enjoy learning about and, most of the time, even doing chemistry. I am not, at the moment, a graduate student or PhD in the field of chemistry. I am only a working chemist. A working analytical chemist. These things might change. It's possible that I'll go to grad school soon. I even have interests in chemistry and science in general that don't specifically adhere to the analytical portion of chemistry and hope to someday pursue those, but, as I said, for the moment I'm just a working analytical chemist.

This sounds like I'm talking a lot about myself. Since it's my blog, I can do that, but after this post I'll be trying to do so much less. The point I'd like to make here, though, is that my perspective is probably going to be different than that of other chemist's blogs. I follow several chemistry and science blogs through my Google: Reader account (ChemBark, Synthetic Remarks, and ScienceGeist are a few) and something has struck me as interesting: most of the chemistry blogs that I've stumbled onto are written by organic chemists. Now I have all sorts of respect for organic, synthetic, and biochemists. Hopefully one day I'll even do more reactions myself. But, these guys aren't the only chemists out there. I also remember running into a graduate student, surely in the ranks of those with complete dissertations by now, that I used to play water polo with. He was an organic chemist, and my courses had focused on analysis with research in biophysics. I remember talking about my recent job acquisition and desire for more education when he found out that I was interested in studying more analytical chemistry. His response: "Yeah, but that's not really chemistry."

Now, if we want to talk about pushing electrons, we analytical chemists don't do it in the same way...that much is true; our electrons get pushed in mass spectrometers or by radiation bombardment. Like I said earlier, I have a lot of respect for the wizards going around synthesizing things through new pathways every day. However, I think analytical chemists make a lot of things happen that otherwise wouldn't. Analytical chemists measure or develop measurements for every type of chemistry that happens. Everybody uses our techniques. Even if an organic synthetic chemist originally developed a way to measure something well, it inherently makes him an analytical chemist as well. This goes for you NMR guys too, at least in my opinion (lowly as it may be!)

So in the end, this post hasn't said much. From here on out, the posts will reflect some actual chemistry and science news/discussions/topics. Not every post will be about analytical topics; some posts might be about synthesis, or just science in general. I just wanted everyone to know before things got started that everyone is welcome here. We all work in the same sphere, so let's all have mutual respect.