2004 Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy

Plenary Lecture: "Good Chemical Measurements, Good Public Policies"

Chicago, Illinois
March 7, 2004

It is indeed a pleasure to be back home at the Pittsburgh Conference. For many years, I was a regular here, and I still count many friends among those who participate in it and sponsor it now. My CV shows that my first major talk at a Pittsburgh Conference was in Atlantic City in 1982, when electroanalytical chemistry was first invited into the tent – on trial. As I recall, Joe Maloy organized that symposium, which was exciting and successful. We earned the privilege to hold another in 1983. I was also present at the creation, when the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry, SEAC, was born in 1983 for the express purpose of organizing an electroanalytical presence every year at Pittcon. Its work has been steady and excellent, and it has added a valuable dimension to the Conference, now for 20 years running.

But my participation at the Pittsburgh Conference dates back earlier, probably to about 1977 or so, when it was still in Cleveland every year, and was significantly narrower in scope.

My mother, though not a scientist, always relished the Conference, because it was never in Pittsburgh! She would eagerly ask, "Where is the Pittsburgh Conference this year?" An intent newspaper reader, she also would occasionally clip out and send a tiny filler column that she had detected in some issue of the Houston Post. Just one sentence: "The Pittsburgh Conference this year was held in New Orleans."

What a success this venture has been. I congratulate the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh and the Society of Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh for the brilliance of their contribution to science and industry, and I thank their members individually for the superhuman effort that brings this gathering to us all every year.

I especially thank President John Baltrus and Program Chairman Brian Strohmeier for extending to me an invitation to present the Plenary Lecture today. This is an honor. This is a privilege.

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Rarely did I impress myself in youth. But I have done it now – with my own age. In the fall, I will be 60. This is my 35th year at a professional level in the academic world. I have achieved senior status.

That's not to say that you should expect special sagacity just because I am graying. H. L. Mencken was on the mark when he wrote, "The older I grow, the more I mistrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." But age does mean that a lot of scenes have passed by, so there is the advantage of having a lot to talk about. Some of it even improves in the recollection.

I would like to draw a little from those recollections as I talk today about how analytical science serves in the formulation of public policy. This is not an everyday topic here at Pittcon, but it is one of contemporary importance.

At every turn now, one encounters sharply debated issues and important public policies that rest on chemical information. This is true in practically any arena where public interest intersects with the material world: health care practice and public health; energy; quality of air, water, and food; manufacturing standards and product liability; criminal justice; national and international security, including the defense against terrorism. The scale can be truly global, as in the case of the current debate over climate change, which extends into international efforts to regulate gaseous emissions. Sometimes the relevant chemical measurements and applicable theory are sound and their scope is appropriate to the policy; often they are inadequate, and a policy or debate overreaches the analytical capability needed to support it. In the decades ahead, the issues with us today will become even more pressing and will drive a still greater reliance on analytical chemistry.

"When you can measure what you are speaking about," Lord Kelvin once said, "and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of a science."¹ Lord Kelvin's focus was on the essentials of what we would know as science, but his comment applies in our world to the formulation of practically any public policy that rests on technical facts about the material world. To paraphrase Kelvin for my purpose, we might say this:

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of a basis of policy, but you have scarcely in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of soundness in policy.

These days policymakers of all kinds – presidents and ministers, members of congresses and parliaments, governors and legislators, mayors and members of municipal councils, corporate CEOs and members of corporate boards, and many others beyond all these – are adopting or carrying out policies every day that rest, or ought to rest, on a technical basis. The question is: How sound is the basis? The answer depends on how well the relevant information has been measured and how well it has been brought into the formulation of the policy.

Yes, in many spheres, good public policy does need to rest on good chemical measurements: accurate measurements of the important things.

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Has it ever been so? Yes, in some degree, at least since valuable analytical measurements were first possible. Early applications were in establishing standard assays to govern commerce in minerals, the safety of water supplies, and the value and safety of foods.

In fact, the importance of scientific work to the development of public policy was recognized even before chemistry became a serious science. Governments were always interested in the relevance of anything technical that could improve weaponry, and they focused a good deal of attention on the precise measurement of time as an aid to navigation. In the United States, the Lincoln Administration chartered the National Academy of Sciences in 1863, at the apex of the Civil War, expressly to establish a resource for any department of the federal government to gain advice on technical subjects. Analytical chemistry was hardly in business in 1863.

But the picture has gradually changed during my lifetime to the point that the availability of chemical measurements has actually given rise to new public issues and created a need for new public policies. Some of these issues are shaking the foundations of the global economic and political systems.

Why has all this happened?

The basis is surely in the breathtaking development of analytical capabilities from the 1960s through the present day, which has established sheer power. Before the '60s, most analytical chemistry was done with genuinely chemical methods of the type that we used to cover in classical quantitative analysis. As an undergraduate, I learned how to prepare a Gooch crucible and how to ignite a precipitate; I learned to calibrate a double pan balance; I learned about back titrations; I learned about obtaining a representative sample from a lot of coal by the long-pile, alternate-shovel method. Many in this audience did the same. (Well, maybe not the long-pile, alternate-shovel method.) In the '50s and before, these approaches dominated the ability to characterize the material world. Most samples were of what we would now regard as humongous size, and a single determination took minutes to days, depending on sample preparation. Instrumentation was in its infancy, largely because the electronics required were not reliable enough or quiet enough to make instrumental methods really attractive.

All of that changed with the solid-state revolution, and especially with the advent of the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, and the laser. The development of modern analytical methods and instruments has really taken place over about four decades, and it continues in exciting ways. But perhaps the most intense period was the decade of the '70s, when new electronic, optical, and separations capabilities opened a period of astounding analytical development. That was the period when the Pittsburgh Conference grew essentially to its current scale and established itself as the venue for introducing new instruments and methodology.

The new methods brought at least three things that had been missing in the world of classical analytical chemistry: dynamic range, sensitivity, and simple, fast sample handling

• Dynamic range in the old days was often no more than an order of magnitude, sometimes two. Rarely more. The new methods frequently provided five orders or so, sometimes considerably more. This improvement gave freedom to address samples with widely varying characteristics or constituents within a sample varying by orders of magnitude in presence.
• Sensitivity brought the capability to deal with very small samples or to detect and quantify trace constituents.
• Sample handling was dramatically improved, and often automated, to save time in huge quantities. These advances made it possible to address many, many similar samples in a reasonable period. They also made it possible to address a measurement to a particular location on a larger sample.

In fact, the methods now available to us have brought far more than these three benefits. They rest on such a range of properties that it is now possible to obtain an enormous selection of information – information about local chemical environment or spatial distribution, information about genetic identity, information about mass fractions in a complex distribution, information resolved with respect to sensory or therapeutic effect. Remarkable analytical power now rests easily in our hands, and it is changing the way that we as a society are thinking about our world, our competitive opportunities, our legal constructs – and our politics.

Let me set out just five arenas in which issues of public policy have arisen from chemical measurements:

• The ready adoption of DNA screening, which can succeed with the tiniest of samples, even very old samples, is fantastically definitive by comparison to anything that was available earlier for relating circumstances to individual people and for defining the genetic makeup of individuals. It has already changed much about criminal law and forensic practice. It is central to political debates about capital punishment. It now resolves paternity disputes with little or no action in the courts. As genetic understanding evolves, the ensuing analytical capabilities are bound to stimulate serious legal action, public debate, and legislation concerning the legal framework for insurance and liability.
• The ability to resolve atomic composition in two and three dimensions on the micron scale has altered means for defining intellectual property. We know well the story of how the battery of methods leading to such information has enabled the technological development of the microelectronics industry, but much less frequently do we recognize the effect on the ways in which governments recognize property rights or on the ways in which industrial players are allowed to protect their investments in new products. One can expect still more evolution of policy as nanoscience becomes nanotechnology, and the needed spatial characterization relates to still finer spatial regimes and to functional groups, molecules, or supermolecular clusters.
• Global competitiveness has become determined not just by cost-effectiveness, but also by quality-effectiveness. Customers can measure quality, and they can also measure the dollar and convenience value of shortcomings in quality. The quality movement has transformed manufacturing procedures and standards worldwide, and it has commonly involved governmental sponsorship of quality improvement. All of this – the movement itself and the governmental policies – rests on the increasing ability to make the right measurements, many of them chemical measurements of starting materials, intermediates, subassemblies, or products.
• Medical diagnostics built on analytical measurements have repeatedly raised international alarm over epidemics and have guided strategies for combating them. The availability of the right measurements has enabled huge international initiatives to improve the state of health in societies that previously could get no concerted attention because there was no way to understand the scope of a problem, its geographic aspects, or the effectiveness of any intervention. Imagine how the world would address the AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa without relatively inexpensive analytical diagnostics. The world wouldn't, because it couldn't. And much of a continent would just slowly, and probably quietly, die. The rest of us would most likely think, as we have for generations about underdeveloped societies, that such was the order of things.

One of the most powerful aspects of having the right measurements is that they make one start to think whether the generally accepted "order of things" is really the way things have to be. This is true whether one is focused on automotive performance, or microelectronic device structure, or the synthesis of pharmaceuticals, or the regulation of foods, or public health in the third world. In so many ways, analysis leads synthesis, but nowhere more critically than in the synthesis of ideas leading to real innovation.

• Far bigger than any other area relevant to this address is the debate about global climate change. The basic hypothesis of the "greenhouse effect" has been around for decades. I read about it even as a middle school student in the '50s, but it has come to the fore in serious politics only in the last decade.

Why? Because accurate measurements of the important things could not be made until the last two decades. The question before us is the possibility of early detection, above the natural environmental "noise level," of a trend that may only be emerging above that level. Large numbers of measurements of different variables are required. Many are of physical quantities, such as temperature, but chemical measurements are critical to the overall assessment, because they relate to the great accounting problem of what happens to carbon after combustion. Moreover, chemical measurements are integral to the integrity of proposed international actions, such as limiting emissions by law or developing systems of trading emissions.

The stridency of the debate comes both from the stakes and from the decades-long time constant for the effect to manifest itself. The stakes are as high as they could possibly be: jobs for millions of people, perhaps even billions; living standards worldwide; viable answers to worldwide energy needs; the extinction of species; the flooding of populated coastal areas; the sustainability of human civilization; the sovereignty of nations. Breathtaking.

And all resting on an issue of chemistry, where analytical measurements are absolutely central to wise public policy. The price for the wrong policy is devastation in some form. The price for even the wisest policy will probably be very high. The best possible wisdom must be sought. It will take some time, and better data than we have.

I cannot think of a single public issue predating the '60s that arose from analytical information or for which analytical information was critical to emerging policy. Our field was industrially and medically important then, but far back on the sidelines politically. Well, times have changed. We analytical chemists are now squarely in the middle of one of the biggest political issues of our time. It will not be a comfortable situation, but it is one of high responsibility. We must execute with skill and integrity.

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That brings us to the manner in which chemical information is handled and understood in public debates. To say something useful, I first need to draw some contrasts between the ways political folks, such as legislators, members of an executive branch, or active members of political parties, do their business vs. the habits to which we in science are accustomed. I spent a career of about 25 years immersed in science, but I have spent the last decade, especially the last six years, working with policy-makers in the public arena. In the process, I hope I have gained a bit of useful insight. In that world, it's always hard to know!

The contrasts are sharp between the two cultures, and it is important to face up to them as we consider the most effective ways for science to link with the policy arena. Let us remember that elected and appointed officials, in the end, have the authority to make public policy. We rarely hold memberships among them. If we in the scientific community are to contribute constructively, it must be through our interface with such people, or alternatively through the press and its influence on them. It will not help to complain that they look at the world differently than we do. They do, indeed. And that's because their methods are suited to their world, much as ours are suited to ours. Here are a few observations concerning things that the two communities do not really understand about each other:

• We in science can afford to wait for a complete picture, or at least a decisive picture; they, in the political sector, usually cannot. It is our discipline to avoid drawing firm conclusions until the full array of data warrants such a step. We may form a hypothesis, but we are usually careful not to claim too much, given whatever data exists. Political leaders do not have that luxury. They are almost always under pressure to act, to choose a course, and to present it confidently to the public. They have to take their best shot when the time comes.
• We can afford to concentrate on our subject, so that we come to understand its nuances and implications fairly fully. They do not have that luxury either. Presidents, governors, members of congress, and members of legislatures are, in some measure, each facing the full array of issues before the nation or a state. They somehow have to rationalize all they can in a single picture and postpone the rest. This is very hard to do, and it leaves them with minimal time to address the essentials of any matter that we wish to communicate to them. Members of executive departments or staff members of legislative committees typically have more time to concentrate.
• We may debate vigorously, but we gradually converge on a picture for a given phenomenon that satisfies nearly all members of the interested technical community. In other words, we strive for something like a persuaded consensus. Because political decisions have to be made with fragmentary information, and because many aspects of human and community relationships are not subject to quantitative theory, governmental officials can hardly ever hope to achieve a consensus, persuaded or not. They strive for whatever within reason – as they interpret reason individually – can gain majority support.
• Scientists believe that all of the good data bearing on an issue should be rationalized in an explanation. If data are disqualified, there has to be a reason, such as an error in the strategy for measurement. In other words, data are to be taken out of the picture only if they are deemed not "good" on the basis of a specified objection. There is much greater tendency among political officers to pick whatever data fit their policy inclination and just to neglect the rest without reason. A scientist views this behavior as undisciplined.
• There is a related point. Scientists know that there is hardly ever a situation when a single definitive measurement can decide a very substantive issue. The answer has to come from an examination of the problem from different angles, from measurements made by different techniques. Confidence that the truth has been found comes when the same picture holds up to these different queries. Political leaders are much more prone to accept a single technical result as definitive, especially if it agrees with what they really want to do for political reasons.
• In science, we are used to being able to think about a problem in isolation. In fact, one of the taught skills of science is how to create experimental circumstances that can disconnect an investigated system from side issues that complicate the picture. In politics, everything remains connected to everything else. Separability usually cannot be achieved, so progress can be achieved only in favorable times, and then only by working the connected issues simultaneously. Favorable times arise when the connected issues are fairly quiet or when they themselves are up for action and can be brought into a comprehensive proposal.
• Finally, the two communities have completely different concepts of what they both call the "real world."

For science, it is physical, objective, and invariant. At the very center of the culture of science are two beliefs: that there is unchanging truth about what the universe is and how it behaves, and that through a suitable program of investigation, practically always involving measurements, we can discover a workable approximation of that truth, at least with respect to the part of the universe under investigation.

For political leaders, the "real world" is one of human opinion. It is subjective and variable. They deal, as Lyndon Johnson said, with "the art of the possible." What matters is what can be managed. In politics, there is broad acceptance of the contemporary adage, "Perception is reality." Scientists are repelled by that notion. At least, I am. For us, only reality is reality.

Let me close this little foray into the properties of the political arena with two additional points not posed as contrasts with science. They are important to what I will say subsequently:

• No political party owns its best people, and the people who have the intellectual strength and skill to reach wise policies are found in both dominant parties. Normally they must come together to achieve success, even if, in the end, they do not vote together.
• Trust is the most important quality in relationships. Trust does not imply political agreement on any given issue, or even on political philosophy. Rather, it is about keeping the cards above the table, about explaining forthrightly why a given position is held and what boundaries exist. Trust is rooted in integrity, forthrightness, respect for relationships, and reliability in the representation of information.

Now let us turn more directly to the real question in this section of my address: How we can best present chemical information and promote understanding in the public arena?

We must begin by recognizing that the burden is on us, the scientific community. While it is undeniable that science is critically important to wise and effective public policies, it does not follow that it is the public's problem, or the political leader's problem, to figure out how to bring the information into the debate. We have the information, so we have to do that.

In the effort, we need to become more effective in presenting our information. To be sure, part of the problem lies in the weak understanding of – indeed, fear of – technical matters among the general public and many political leaders; however a larger factor is that when we do speak, we do not really recognize the culture and needs of the policy world.

I am not saying that we should adopt the political culture and its habits of thought. Not at all. The most important thing that we have going for us is generally high public confidence in the integrity of what we do. It would be disastrous to compromise the respect for science by coming across as just one more interest group trying to spin a message.

Here are six recommendations:

• Above all, we must consistently protect, and even enhance, public respect for the integrity of science and the scientific community by insisting on the proven value of the scientific method and the need to bring all available valid results into an interpretation. We must actively resist the selective interpretation of selected results.
• Second, we should be proactive with the timely development of policy-oriented summaries of technical results. This is our best way of minimizing fragmented public interpretation of a large issue. The National Academies have a long, distinguished record of doing exactly this through their service arm, the National Research Council. The NRC's procedures for choosing panels and for developing and vetting reports are excellent. The specific charge of the NRC is to advise government, so its reports are intended to provide information in the form that policymakers need: a frank summary of the state of knowledge, including gaps in existing knowledge, and a frank evaluation of how that knowledge bears on policy options. Recommendations concerning policy are rendered, but only if they can be supported by the state of knowledge.

More of this kind of thing is needed. The NRC carries out its studies only when chartered to do so by an agency of government. This has the advantage that government may actually consider the evaluation and advice, but it also means that there can be big gaps in what is available to support valid public debate in science-sensitive areas. A commonly missing element in active areas is any regular update, such as annually, of the state of knowledge rendered in a policy-oriented form. I believe that there could be a place here for organizations other than the NRC, perhaps the prominent scientific societies, to charter similar undertakings. There is also a growing need to find ways to support state and local governments as they grapple more frequently with technical matters. Moreover, let us remember the press, which often uses such summaries as a basis for reporting, which, in turn, impinges critically on both public debate and policy development. The needs of the press should be kept directly in mind as reports are prepared.

• Third, we must learn how to improve our ability to write and communicate policy-related science. Perhaps it would be useful to hold one or two trial symposia, even at the Pittsburgh Conference, on this subject. Another possibility is the development of short courses or briefings for members who are about to serve on panels of the kind that I have just discussed. Such efforts should include participation by both lawyers and journalists. Not only do they understand the audience better than we do, but they are also more skilled in communicating with it in the style that is required.
• Fourth, we need to become more effective at helping policy-makers through their moments of decision. A point I made earlier is that they do not have the luxury of waiting for more information when the time comes for them to act. They have to take their best shot. Our community could do a much better job of helping them to understand, in short, direct form, what is and is not known at the moment of action, and where the policy risks lie, at least insofar as technical information is relevant. That service could be effectively supported via a series of annual updates, such as I just recommended. The trick will be to keep updates with this kind of information from becoming perceived as a regular political axe-grinding exercise. The ideal can be approached, I think, but it will take sharp attention to the integrity of summary and communication.
• Fifth, our community should more consciously develop channels of communication with officers in agencies of the executive branch and with the staff leadership of legislative committees. These are the people who have time to understand a big issue in some detail, and they typically influence the development of policy over a long term. Our community should work to become a regular resource for them.
• Last, and very important, we must guard to our utmost against transforming our leading professional organizations into partisans or political agents with respect to a given issue. Public credibility in the integrity of science is at stake, and preserving that is, in the long run, the greatest contribution we can make to the health of the larger world. The temptation to do otherwise will be great, given the stakes that are already on the table. Political positioning might be right for individual scientists, but not for science.

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What, then, are the areas of analytical chemistry that will be critical to sound public policy in the future? I promised in the abstract to say something about them, but given where we have gone in this talk, let me phrase the discussion not in terms of particular methodologies, but instead in terms of the big policy questions to which scientific results are critical. Here is my incomplete roster:

• How will we meet the energy needs of a developing world?
• How will we continue to evaluate and to address the impact of climate change?
• How will we support health care that is affordable in the context of the developed world? Or in the context of the underdeveloped world?
• How will we detect and defeat new threats to health, including plagues and scourges that arise from evolutionary change?
• How will we assure safety of the food and water supplies?
• How will we defend our society in the face of large, continuous threats from individuals and non-governmental organizations?
• How will we support a pace of commercial innovation that can preserve living standards in advanced economies, as members of the developing world strive to join them?
• How will we preserve personal liberty while we address all of these other things?

There is an important place for analytical results and new analytical approaches in every one of these spheres. Of course they are very big questions indeed. As you go about your work, choosing problems and solving them, you inevitably have to be much more specific. But there can be motivation and pride in thinking about your choices and your successes in the context of one or more of these questions. In the end, the answers will issue from the knowledge and methods developed in many places by many people, just as science always progresses. The answers are profoundly important, and they will determine the world that our children and grandchildren will inhabit, so it is a privilege for any one of us to be a part of the hunt.

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In the closing moments of this address, I would like to say just a few things about the education of leaders and general citizens of modern societies. What could be more important for a university president to think about? Let me make three quick points.

It is easy for me to declare that we need better education in science and math in this country. Of course we do. But everyone knows that. There are occasional efforts to do something about it, both in K-12 education and in collegiate curricula. I have come to believe that the citizenry does need to know something factual of the central provinces of science, but I also believe that they need to understand how science works. We do not tell that story often. We need interesting ways to illustrate it to a new generation.

Also, the nation as a whole needs a much better grasp of large ranges of numbers, of probability, and of risk. In my view, it would be more valuable for our society to concentrate on these topics, if we could find interesting and effective ways to teach them, than to send so many undergraduates through calculus. It might even be both effective and powerful to focus an effort on middle school students, who obviously have innate gaming skills.

Finally, we as a nation somehow need to build a greater emphasis on the long view into public life. I am continuously struck by the extraordinarily short-term focus of contemporary democracy in America. It was not always so. The founders had big dreams about what could happen to benefit generations beyond their own.

A favorite illustration of mine derives from the legacy of Mirabeau B. Lamar, second President of the Republic of Texas, who urged his fledgling nation to develop not one, but two universities. This was in 1838. Texas was on the frontier. The daily goal of individuals was survival, not high culture. The Texas population – everyone included, part of the civil society or not – was only 50,000. The whole nation was smaller than our present-day University of Texas. Five square miles to every person. Few schools, no cities. A university must have been practically the farthest thing from the minds of most people as being essential to their future. Lamar himself had never attended a university and could have had only a second-hand understanding of their social benefits. Yet he sought two. And not colleges, but universities.

Lamar was not a detached intellectual writing such ideas in a personal diary to be discovered by curious scholars of a later era. He was the President of the Republic, a man at the center of affairs in this incipient society. He declared these concepts to be foundations for the future. And people followed him. The Congress dedicated public land for the vision.

How wise they were. How unlimited by immediate circumstance. These early leaders were looking far beyond the unrelieved crudeness of their immediate world, not just to a more pleasant, more prosperous home, but literally to the vision of a fresh, vigorous civilization. And that required the resources of universities.

Lamar could not have known exactly how the story would progress, but somehow I feel that he would not be surprised.

How can we give our children the discipline to take a longer, fuller view? Surely such a wish is not quixotic, because we know from our own history that such discipline existed and was sustained in public life right here in America. It will prove central to success with any of the big questions that I posed earlier. In the decades before us, given the challenges we all face, the society that will best succeed will surely be one that thinks further ahead than the next election.

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You have been generous indeed to hear me out. Thank you all for listening today.

¹Lord Kelvin, Popular Lectures and Addresses, 1891-1894.

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