A PERSPECTIVE ON PERSONAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO FT-ICR MASS SPECTROMETRY.

This is a personal perspective on our contributions to FT-ICR, many of early ones in a collaboration with Charles Wilkins and Michael Gross starting in the mid-1970s and then continuing for many years in collaboration of Don Rempel and Michael Gross. The perspective is to honor Alan Marshall, who with Melvin Comisarow, first demonstrated FT-ICR MS in 1974 (Comisarow & Marshall, 1974). Our intention is to review the contributions made together with Wilkins, Rempel, and a group of graduate and postdoctoral students, starting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and continuing here at Washington University in St. Louis. Besides offering a chance to reminisce about the early and exciting days of FT-ICR MS when academic laboratories were building and modifying mass spectrometers and other instruments, a nearly lost art, I am reminded of my editorship of this journal occurring over part of that time.