Chemjobber highlighted Celia Arnaud’s item in the December 3rd issue of C&E News. Which laments that, when older high-resolution NMRs are no longer supported by their manufacturers, instrument labs are left with few good options: DIY maintenance or high capital expenses for replacement.
Our own Sophia Hayes, who actively uses the High-Resolution NMR Facility in her research at Washington University in St Louis, is extensively quoted in the article. She credits the director of the facility, Manmilan Singh, for keeping older machines running by pirating stockpiled instruments for spare parts. She further speculates that in the near future, benchtop NMRs — which offer lower resolution, but require no helium for cooling the magnet — may become the workhorses for routine NMR analyses.
Those-were-the-days time: a Varian A-60 was the workhorse NMR when I was a grad student in the [mumblemulble] ’70s. If you wanted to install it on your desktop, I suppose you could have, but you’d need a mighty tall stool to operate it.
“Computers and the physics of complex biological systems”
