Abstract
This contribution is an attempt to evoke the favorable atmosphere that prevailed in Lausanne around 1986 and provided the backdrop of our invention of two-dimensional ion cyclotron resonance mass spectroscopy (2D ICR-MS). To avoid a self-centered histoire d’ancien combattant, we shall try to emphasize the context: the contributions of key players within our nascent research group at UNIL and the established group of Tino Gäumann at EPFL, the role of external speakers, and the open atmosphere that was not yet polluted by bibliometrics, obsessive concern with impact factors, and top–down management of research. We shall also explain why the idea of 2D ICR-MS has been ignored for many years and still has a limited impact: different scientific cultures in the ICR and NMR communities, different concerns with fundamental vs. applied research, different status of theory and numerical simulations, different levels of commitment of instrument manufacturers, not to mention many theoretical problems that appear to be at least as challenging in ICR as in NMR.
Highlights
From the day of August 1985 when I left the thriving research group headed by Richard Ernst at ETH, after five intense years in Zurich that allowed me to give countless physical chemistry classes as a teaching assistant, write about 20 papers, and complete a sprawling monograph [1], I knew that I had to cut the umbilical cord and develop some novel projects of my own
My appointment at the Institut de chimie organique (ICO) of Université de Lausanne (UNIL) seemed to be based on a misunderstanding, which was one reason why I occasionally attended talks on physical chemistry at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
My visit to Estonia was part of an extensive tour of the USSR on the invitation of Yuri Ovchinnikov, a trip that was somewhat impeded by the fact that all flights to the USSR were suspended following the downing of a Boeing 747 of Korean Airlines on 30 August 1983, so that I had to fly to Helsinki and take a boat from there
Summary
From the day of August 1985 when I left the thriving research group headed by Richard Ernst at ETH, after five intense years in Zurich that allowed me to give countless physical chemistry classes as a teaching assistant, write about 20 papers, and complete a sprawling monograph [1], I knew that I had to cut the umbilical cord (abnabeln in German) and develop some novel projects of my own. When moving from ETH to the Université de Lausanne (UNIL), I carried with me, as entrenched in my mental luggage, my passion for two-dimensional Fourier transformations—which I had stumbled upon in Oxford around 1975 and which I had carried with me to San Diego, Massachusetts, Zurich, and Lausanne—and my recent fascination for multiple-quantum filtration as a means of identifying multiexponential relaxation [2,3] and my dream that the automated interpretation of two-dimensional spectra by pattern recognition would sooner or later be widely recognized [4]
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