The Triple Quadrupole and MS/MS

The Story

The story of how the core of my research switched from electrochemistry to mass spectrometry begins with Richard Nicholson’s taking a year off from his faculty appointment at Michigan State University to become a rotator at the National Science Foundation. He had just gotten a Digital Equipment PDP-8 computer which he said I could use while he was gone.

I loved it, immediately imagining it not only automating data collection, but controlling the experiment as developed in the Chemical Instrumentation category.

But it was in imagining an intelligent instrument that would automatically design and run an experiment (with minimal assistance from the operator) that Rick Yost and I ended up developing the triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. You can hear this fascinating story by clicking Interviews under My Work. You can also get an idea of the great increase in information available from the sample over a single mass spectrum from the figure illustrating this category.

This adoption of mass spectrometry to achieve my instrumental vision not only redirected my research program but gave the world an analytical tool that has spawned and enabled the fields of proteomics, metabolomics, untargeted analysis, and much else.

Dick Nicholson never returned to MSU to reclaim his computer. He stayed on at the NSF and then had a remarkable career as Director of AAAS.

Publications and Patents developing and using the Triple Quadrupole mass spectrometer

The people who helped produced the papers, chapters, and patents below are Richard Yost, James Morrison, D. C. McGilvery, D. Smith, John Stultz, John Holland, J. David Pinkston, John Allison, j. Throck Watson, Mark Bauer, Brian Eckenrode, M. Vicenti, Jae Schwartz, Adrian Wade, Graham Cooks, Gregory Dolnikowski, Michael Kristo, Kent Voorhees, Stephen Durfee, James Holtzclaw, Mary Seeterlin, Paul Vlasak, Douglas Beussman, Richard McLane, Tina Erickson, and Ronald Lopshire.

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