Meeting Reports

The 8th Technicon International Congress, was held from the 12th-14th December, at the Wembley Conference Centre, London, UK. It is over seven years since such an event was last held in the United Kingdom and over the three days of the congress a wide range of analytical topics covering both industrial and clinical chemistry were covered in the various sessions. In addition the delegates were able to browse around the complete exhibits of Technicon products and to discuss various aspects of their work with the Technicon staff in attendance. As one has come to expect from such conferences it was extremely well organised and Technicon should be congratulated on this aspect. The technical papers were informative if sometimes lacking in originality. The papers did however prompt interesting discussions and the panel sessions were a worthwhile and stimulating adjunct to the meeting. The complete presentations will be published shortly. In addition it is hoped that some of the more original works will be published in The Journal of Automatic Chemistry. It is therefore not the aim of this report to cover the entire meeting programme, rather to deal with those lectures that appealed to the various correspondents or when points were made of more general interest. The balance of papers between the clinical and industrial applications increasingly becomes more equable which whilst it cannot reflect the revenue from instrument sales shows how important the management of Technicon considers the industrial market. The fully automated HPLC system and the more versatile InfraAnalyzer systems shown will surely have a large impact on the introduction of automation in many new areas at present reliant on inadequate manual analyses. Data Management and computer applications were considered in some detail if only in a clinical context. One of the main objections to computers is that they are shrouded by jargon used by computer specialists to protect themselves. This often has a self defeating role and people resist becoming involved in new technology because of it. It is strange therefore that clinical chemists have compounded the problem more by considering the application of computers to clinical laboratories quite in isolation from other analytical chemists. Handling data from an AutoAnalyzer, be it dealing with clinical or industrial analysis, is a similar problem, and many industries deal with large amounts of data and data banks. There is surely much to be gained from a cross fertilization of ideas and little by further hiding behind another level of jargon. The symposium sessions were opened with a welcoming address by the Managing Director of Technicon, Mr. Tony Scobie. He then introduced Mrs. Louise Evans who presented the 1978 Technicon Award to Professor J. R. Daly, University of Manchester, UK. Mr. Scobie then introduced Mr. Jack Whitehead, Chairman, The Chief Executive of Technicon who spoke for a few minutes on the Company’s future programme. The plenary paper ’Food Analysis in the Wind of Change’ was then delivered in an interesting and informative manner by Dr. Magnus Pike. He put forward fairly innovative and informed views which will no doubt cause much food for thought by quality control managers and the like. The main congress proceedings were then organised into parallel sessions around various subject themes. The titles of these sessions were: Laboratory Data Management, Automated Investigation in blood banking, Economics of Analysis in Commodity Trading and Food Processing, Current Trends in Clinical Chemistry, Automation in water monitoring and sewage control, Developments in Automated Haematology, New Windows in Clinical Chemistry, Automation and Application of Immunoassay, Automated Analysis for intensive care and Pharmaceutical quality control. These lecture sessions were further supplemented by evening workshops which were also very well attended. Dr. R. Scholtis, the Director of a large medical laboratory in the Netherlands, adopted a humorous, but nevertheless informative and very useful approach to describing the introduction of computers in his laboratory. He traced the development from the planning stages in 1965 through to the implementation in 1971, the addition of online automation, and the system up-grade in 1976. Dr. Scholtis concluded with a number of general observations that will be of considerable interest to anyone contemplating following a similar path. (1) Hardware is relatively cheap programming is very expensive. (2) Once you start you cannot go back the work load increases so much that reversion to manual techniques becomes physically impossible. (3) Don’t play with "home-made" computing systems. They are not cost-effective. (4) Go to a good and not a big company. (5) Find someone to advise you who has experience in computers.