5.1.4.
In October a new IAEA expert arrived, John Stewart, an agricultural chemist from the University of Saskatoon (Canada), to spend a year at CENA to study soils and plants in Brazil. After some time, he confided to me that he had a curious problem. Whenever he submitted two identical soil or plant samples for analysis to a local laboratory, two entirely different results were reported. “I wish I had an AutoAnalyzer,” he said. “I could analyze myself all the soil extracts that I already have.” He had at that point a few thousand samples and needed them analyzed for phosphate, nitrogen (ammonia and nitrate), chloride, sulphate, Iron, etc. He was right, the Technicon AutoAnalyzer® was at that time the state-of-the-art automated analyzer, based on air-segmented continuous flow, where reagent based colorimetric procedures for clinical, industrial and agricultural assays were fully automated. I could have helped him with the instrument, since I had nine years earlier attended Technicon’s course in Surrey, England, where Dr. Holy from Technicon gave a series of fascinating presentations and guided lab experiments. As a consequence, I became a devoted AutoAnalyzer fan, and even published a paper suggesting its use in radiochemistry (Ruzicka 1969).
The problem was that we did not have an AutoAnalyzer, and IAEA would not buy us one, since it would not have been diplomatic for us to broadcast what the real problem was with the local analytical service. When I told John that there may be another solution, we became partners in the unplanned venture of applying FIA to real life assays. To begin with, we had a pump and about 20 m of 0.8 mm I.D. polyethylene tubing that I had brought from Denmark. John found somewhere a Beckmann spectrophotometer and recorder, covered with layers of dust. We found bleach in the supermarket, and phenol and a syringe in a pharmacy. The rest of the materials were sent by Elo Hansen from Copenhagen, courtesy of said Jerry Schaeffer, who was a Lufthansa Airline station master in Brazil. His son Jan gave us his Lego® toys and Berga made the injector block. The first real life FIA machine was ready to go.
