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Clinical Chemistry 47: 1509-1515, 2001;
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(Clinical Chemistry. 2001;47:1509-1515.)
© 2001 American Association for Clinical Chemistry, Inc.

Proceedings of the 24th Arnold O. Beckman Conference

Laboratory Adaptations—Changing Expectations

Robert M. Kisabeth1

1 Mayo Medical Laboratories, 200 First St., SW, Rochester, MN 55905.

There is a favorite aphorism attributed to Charles Mayo that states, "In the study of some apparently new problems we often make progress by reading the work of great people of the past ... " (1).

Similarly, insight for the future can be gained by reflecting on the example of Dr. Arnold O. Beckman, who celebrated his 101st birthday on April 10, 2001. From his invention of the "acidimeter" (patent no. 2,058,761) to his introduction in 1940 of the DU Spectrophotometer through Beckman Instruments, which redefined "accuracy" in clinical chemistry measurements, Dr. Beckman "walked his talk", having posited that "There is no satisfactory substitute for excellence" (2) and "When you’re faced with the necessity to do something, that’s a stimulus to invention. If (my classmate) hadn’t come in with his lemon juice problem, chances are I never in the world would have thought about making a pH meter"(2).


Preparation

If laboratory professionals are to heed Dr. Beckman’s call to excellence, we must first acknowledge, together with members of the diagnostics industry he helped create, a great obstacle to achieving a level of performance commensurate with patients’ needs. This challenge resides in continuing failure, individually and collectively, to define quality objectives in terms of laboratories’ clinical objectives. Although much needs to be said, has been said, and will be said relative to preanalytical and postanalytical phases of quality assurance, much too little has been said of analytical quality. Little effort has been made toward dispelling the body of collective fiction that suggests that "The quality’s the same everywhere". Dr. N.W. Tietz has expressed concern for the degree to which we have strayed from a laboratorian’s fundamental concern with the need that procedures be accurate, precise, specific, and comparable among laboratories (3).

Rudyard Kipling’s The . . . [Full Text of this Article]


The Prescriptive Laboratory


Genomics and Proteomics


Individualization of Therapy


References






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