Wednesday, 17 July 2013

to share or not to share

Our college has a few short courses in addition to the regular courses of the university. One of these we did was an introduction to bioinformatics. The person teaching this had to take a few days off and requested me to teach mass spectrometry of proteins and other such large molecules.
I had to read up a lot to teach this, since I did not remember anything beyond Aston's mass spectrograph and vaguely remembered  the term McLafferty rearrangement.
I learnt that the ion trap used in some mass spectrometers was based on the quadropole mass filter co-invented by a physicist Wolfgang Paul, who won the Nobel for this. The more famous Wolfgang Pauli referred to him as "my real part" !!
I thought of sharing this bit of humour with my students, but did not. Sadly, none of them would have understood the joke. 

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