This week's C&EN

A variety of interesting tidbits:

• More stories from Charleston, West Virginia ACS members, regarding their experiences with the MCHM spill. 
• An editorial on the recent dustup at the ICQC conference and related petition regarding the number of women speakers. (by Maureen Rouhi)
• An invitation for applications to a workshop for postdoc-to-faculty in August. (by Linda Wang)
• Boy, ACC sounds bullish on jobs from shale gas -- 600,000 jobs in the next ten years? Count me skeptical. (by Michael McCoy)

I really enjoyed this series on lab-to-commercial scale work by Rick Mullin, Ann Thayer and Michael McCoy. I found Rick Mullin's story about a University of Kentucky professor's work on better mercury chelators to be fascinating (great molecule -- what to do with it?). Their work with PCI Synthesis for scale-up is highlighted, including this mysterious little comment (emphasis mine): 

In the face of these challenges, PCI’s analytical group took the catbird seat. 

“Analytical and synthesis have to work hand in hand,” Price says. “You don’t know if your synthesis guys are doing a good job if you can’t see what they’re doing.” PCI has significantly boosted its analytical chemistry staff over the past four years, Price says, and the firm now has nearly as many analytical chemists—about 20—as process chemists. 

Mehdi Yazdi, director of analytical chemistry at PCI, who joined the company in 2011, says the firm’s work for small clients such as CTI is picking up. “Since I have been here, we’ve revamped the whole analytical department,” Yazdi says. PCI has replaced nuclear magnetic resonance testing with high-performance liquid chromatography, he notes, a shift that proved crucial in developing NBMI to FDA standards.   

 While I certainly agree, I am wondering what PCI was doing without HPLC? That is oddly worded to me.