Reference Materials for Chemical Analysis Certification, Availability, and Proper Usage

Edited by Markus Stoeppler, Wayne R. WOK PeterJjenks

0 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH, 2001

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About the genesis of this book

It is usual for the editors to set the scene for the writing of such a book as this: unusually the asked me to contribute, from the Publishers Chair.

This book is all about using reference materials. The editors have been closely involved with the users of reference materials for many years: they Dr. Markus Stoeppler, Dr. Wayne Wolf and Peter Jenks. In the discussions that lead up to com- missioning this book I talked to them about the world of reference materials and asked them what drove them to undertake this work.

Markus told me that Wayne was perhaps the first person to see the need to plan a special RM meeting, and that he and Markus had already met, in the I ~ ~ o ’ s , before this meeting was organized. Markus said of those early days:

“We both felt from the beginning of our co-operation that we should spend a sig- nificant part of our scientific life to the improvement of analytical science, particu- lary the reliability of methods”.

Wayne‘s work was in basic analytical methodology and food science. He worked at the US Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Laboratories in Beltsville, just outside Washington DC. Markus work was devoted to the development and improvement of methods for the analysis of elements. They both recognized in the early 1970’s the “must” of using reference and so-called “control” materials. In 1971 Markus became responsible for a new analytical section in his institute at the Research Center Juelich, Germany, better known as the “KFA”. This section partici- pated, from that time, in many international analytical inter comparisons, including those within IUPAC and subsequently in numerous BCR certification campaigns. At that time Markus first met, and then worked for decades with Ben Griepink, BCR, who has written a thoughtful foreword to this volume, and this scientific part- nership remained valid until Markus’ retirement. Another analytical impetus came from the joint efforts with colleagues from NISTwith the 1979 start of the joint US- German Environmental Specimen Banking program.

In the course of the first BERM meeting, wich later became the BERM series of RM symposia both Marlms and Wayne had the impression that in addition to the special Symposia Issues that gave just impressions on the “state of the RM art” there was a real need for a well organized book to guide the interested reader sys- tematically through the numerous steps and pitfalls of RM planning, production,

294 About the genesis of this book

use. Wayne and Markus started, together with a number of willing co-authors, in the late 1980, to prepare a handbook on the use of reference materials, but for a number of reasons it did not reach fruition.

A new stimulus came when Wayne and Markus met Peter Jenks at the 6” BERM Symposium in Hawaii in 1994. Peter was working for Promochem GmbH in Ger- many, a small company that had developed a unique position as a supplier of ref- erence materials produced by a wide range of governmental agencies around the world. Wayne said of that meeting “We were impressed by Peter’s experience in the RM business and clear formulated ideas how the users of RMs should be educated to avoid the nasty errors that often change the expected benefit of using reference materials into just its opposite”.

Peter had started work as a Clinical Chemist, studying under Prof. Tom Whithead at the Wolfson Institute in Birmingham, EngIand. He moved into the commercial world, spending 13 years with BDH Chemicals Ltd in England, before moving to Promochem. Peter told me: “Working with Promochem I began to realize that the application of Quality Systems, reference materials, proficieny testing, laboratory accreditation, and so on, wich had been pioneered by Tom Whithead in the UK Clin- ical Chemistry laboratoris of the early 1970’s had not yet migrated fully to main- stream analytical chemistry. The problems I had faced as a young scientist in the mid 1g7o’s were still challenging analysts in the mid ~ggo’s”.

Many discussions, continued after this symposium, showed that the three were thinking along very similar, almost identical lines. They wanted to include the wis- dom and ideas of the many scientists they had worked with, and to write a cohesive book, not a collection of review articles, including just the necessary basic informa- tion and avoiding too much theory and lengthy chapters. So, based on former ideas but with regard to the rapid development in electronic media, especially the Internet and e-mail which would allow regular exchange of text and ideas between authors and editors, they designed this book as a guide for practitioners. At the Berm 7 Meeting, held in Antwerp during 1997, they agreed with VCH, now Wiley-VCH, to publish the book. A favorable situation was that Markus, now a retired person, had time enough to assist his co-editors in completing the many urgent organizational and technical tasks needed to bring the manuscripts to completion.

Needless to say that this project had not to be completed without the help of many of the editors colleagues (the reader may be suprised by the relatively large number of contriburors) from around the world, all of whom are highly respected experts.

This book is published to coincide with the 8th BERM meeting, held in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2000. We do expect that this work wilI be useful for newcomers as well as for more experienced readers. Since there is another book an reference mate- rials due to be released at the same time, edited by Adolf Zschunlte, BAM, Germany, we have cooperated with Prof. Zschunlte to try reduce any overlap with hope that both books will be complementary rather than competitive.

Steffen Pauly, Wiley-VCH

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