Abstract
Using instruments that are now available commercially, it’s possible to pull five milliliters of air into a syringe, bang it into a gas chromatograph, and then to report the abundance of carbon-13 in the methane present at natural abundance in that air.  With allowance for splits, you’ll be sending only 130 picomoles of methane carbon to the mass spectrometer, but the 95% confidence interval for your analysis will be +/- 0.00009 atom percent carbon-13.  In my presentation, I’ll do my best to answer two questions: (1) how is it possible to make measurements of such precision on such small quantities and what are the limits on such technologies, and (2) why should we want to make such measurements in the first place?  My discussion will cover recent developments in on-line hydrogen isotopic analyses as well as analyses of carbon-13 in natural products ranging from lipids to nucleic acids.
 

Background
Dr. Hayes is Senior Scientist in the Department of Geology and Geophysics and Director of the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, U. S. A.  Prior to taking up these appointments in 1996, he was for more than 26 years a member of the faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington, serving there as Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and of Geological Sciences.  Together with members of his research group, he studies Earth’s “carbon cycle,” the global network of processes in which plants and algae produce organic matter and animals and bacteria degrade that material to produce mobile, reactive substances like carbon dioxide and methane.  Hayes’s particular specialty has been the measurement and interpretation of variations in the abundances of the isotopes of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen.  He has developed techniques that allow measurement of these variations using samples as small as a billionth of a gram.  Such miniaturization has proven important because it allows isotopic analyses of individual organic compounds.  Dr. Hayes graduated from Iowa State University in 1962 and completed his doctoral studies under the supervision of Professor Klaus Biemann at MIT in 1966.  In 1987-88 Hayes was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  In 1997 he shared the Harold C. Urey Medal of the European Association for Geochemistry with Professor Geoffrey Eglinton of the University of Bristol, England.  In 1998, he was awarded the Treibs Medal of the Geochemical Society and elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Meeting details

Date:	Wednesday	March 14, 2001
Time:	6:00 pm	Social hour, registration (no-host cocktails)
	7:00 pm	Dinner
	8:15 pm	Presentation (free, no reservations required)
Dinner:	Choice of:	Rosemary Chicken with Roasted Red Potatoes
		Sirloin Beef Tips with Burgundy Mushroom Sauce and Parsley Buttered Egg Noodles
		Meatless Lasagna
	includes	Chocolate Layer Cake, Coffee, Wine.
Cost:	$25.00	BAMS members.  Reservations required by noon Wednesday 3/7/01
	$35.00	Non-members.  Reservations required by noon Wednesday 3/7/01
	$15.00	Students only.  Reservations required by noon Wednesday 3/7/01

Note: 2001 dues need to be paid to obtain member price.  Dues ($20) may be paid at the meeting

Maps & directions
Holiday Inn San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge
1500 Powell Street
Emeryville, CA  94608
(510) 658-9300
map  (Note: I believe this map is incorrect.  The hotel is WEST of the freeway on Powell, not east!)
 
 

Want to be a judge?  The Intel International Science & Engineering Fair 2001 needs you! See the call for judges and/or their web site.

Other meeting notices received by BAMS:
2nd Workshop on Harsh-Environment Mass Spectrometry, 3/18/2001 (http://www.marine.usf.edu/mass_spec/HEMSconf.htm)
 

The San Francisco Bay Area Mass Spectrometry discussion group was formed in 1980 to provide a regular gathering for people interested in mass spectrometry and allied topics. BAMS currently has a membership of about 280 individual and 20 corporate members, and meets 8-10 times per year for a midweek dinner and lecture.  Meetings attract between 30 and 90 people, and are held at a restaurant or hotel in the bay area convenient for our speaker.  We usually convene at 6:00pm for cocktails, dinner at 7:00pm, and lecture at 8:15pm.
 

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Last update: 3/1/01.