Analytical Chemistry - Can we please Modernize the Curriculum?
January 9, 2018 I occasionally rotate into teaching the 2000-level analytical chemistry course. I think we do a disservice to our students by not demanding the books be modernized. Despite knowing for 25+ years that our books mainly seem to focus on coal chemistry from the 1950s, we still have not brought in modern examples of chemical equilibrium into the analytical chemistry texts. We don't include modern bioanalytical binding arrays (DNA, Protein and Carbohydrate). We don't discuss cyclodextrin inclusion complexes that are used in chromatography and electrophoresis. We don't discuss ion-inclusion dyes commonly used in biological studies for tracking calcium. We don't show the old ways of doing analyses and then fast forward to the common instrumental analysis approaches. We discuss the most important aspect of the analysis, the sample preparation, as an afterthought even though a significant amount of equilibrium chemistry is involved. That's my two-c