Courtesy: Human Genome Program, U.S. Department of Energy,
Genomics and Its Impact on Science and Society: A 2008 Primer,
2008. (Original version 1992, revised 2001 and 2008.)
http://genomicscience.energy.gov. Today, the disciplinary
distinctions between biology, chemistry, and mass spectrometry
are often blurred. These disciplines and their many subfields
have been interwoven for the past 50 years. Frank Field, who
himself moved from the petrochemical industry and mass
spectrometry to biomedical research noted in 2009, “The real
excitement in science is in biology, and mass spectrometry has
made significant contributions to biology” (50).While biological
applications of mass spectrometry are a current focus and
strength of the field, the roots of this research trace back to
some of the earliest adopters of mass spectrometry in the 1940s.
The Early Adopters In the late 1940s mass spectrometry’s main
applications were in the petroleum industry and in physics;
however, a minority of interested scientists was re