Alan Marshall: A Scientist and a Gentleman

History in the Making

When Marshall initially mentioned the idea to Comisarow, Marshall recalled, even Comisarow was skeptical, listing all the reasons it couldn’t be done. But Marshall convinced him it could.

The key ingredients for a novel scientific breakthrough were at hand.

“A lot of people think that science occurs by brilliant intuition coming out of blue sky,” said Marshall. “Really what is much more the case is that somebody knows something in one area and transfers it to another.”

With such a challenge, two heads were far better than one. Comisarow brought to the partnership expertise in ICR, a tool first developed in the 1930s, while Marshall offered expertise in NMR along with a his strong ICR background. Marshall’s knowledge of NMR was important in part because Fourier Transform (a centuries-old mathematical algorithm that converts signals detected over time into a spectrum of usable data) had recently been combined with NMR; in fact, Swiss researcher Richard Ernst went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing this tool.

“It wasn’t accidental that it took two people,” Marshall said of FT-ICR.

What helped set this effort apart was Marshall’s unique conflux of qualities: an ability to approach a problem with a broad command of science, a confidence in his abilities, a gift for teamwork, and the diligence to put in long hours, do the tedious calculations and write up the results.

Naresh Dalal, professor of chemistry at FSU and a researcher with the Mag Lab’s Electron Magnetic Resonance program, remembers the night in December 1973 when Marshall and Comisarow first hit pay dirt with the help of a 2-tesla magnet that Comisarow had configured into the world’s first FT-ICR spectrometer. Dalal, a UBC postdoc at the time, was working late in his second floor lab when an exuberant Marshall came in waving a piece of graph paper at him.

“We just created a new technique,” Marshall, a few months shy of his 30th birthday, told Dalal. “This is the world’s best mass spectrum.”

It looked like just a bumpy line on a scrap of paper. But Marshall recognized it for an achievement of exceptional promise.

“The peak was very narrow, and that’s what was better,” said Marshall.

The peak represented the mass spectrum of a methane gas sample the men had tested using the new technique. Determining the mass spectrum of a simple, well-known substance was of no particular note. But, as Marshall then boasted to his friend Dalal, the resolution they had achieved was so high that if they were to examine a sample containing 50 different compounds, they would get 50 distinct peaks. While it was possible at the time to identify that many molecules within one sample by using existing ICR techniques, the resolution was not nearly as high as with this new approach. And while existing techniques required an hour for such results, Marshall and Comisarow had achieved theirs in seconds. Their instrument allowed them to measure all the molecules at once, rather than one type at a time, as instruments did at the time.

It was, in fact, the beginning of a revolution in analytical chemistry. But nobody told that to the editors of the prestigious International Journal of Mass Spectrometry and Ion Processes, who rejected Marshall and Comisarow’s paper reporting the news. Fortunately for science, Chemical Physics Letters did accept it. While the paper created a stir, it hardly changed the field overnight.

“I felt like it had to work,” said Marshall. “It took a while to convince everybody else.”

While conducting most of his research on NMR, Marshall continued to develop the new invention while waiting for technology, equipment and the mindset of scientists to catch up. More than anyone, Marshall saw the potential in the invention, and devoted his intellect, hard work and passion to developing it.

“Smart isn’t enough,” observed his wife. “He’s also diligent. He works more hours than anyone else in his lab and everyone knows it.”

Michael Bowers, a chemistry professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has known Marshall for some 35 years, said Marshall is king of the field. “He’s innovative in that he’s continually trying to develop new methods to improve FT-ICR,” said Bowers. “There have been a lot of good people working there, but he stands above the rest in developing the method.”

Next Page A Career Takes Wing   |   Full Article