Post date: Feb 16, 2020 8:6:34 PM

Analytical chemistry is boring! All we do is run samples for real chemists, generate some data and let excel churn out some numbers. So if the phrase “analytical chemistry” did not immediately put you off and you are still reading here is a brief description of a week in my job…

My week started with a man carrying a locked briefcase coming in and locking us in the vibrational spectroscopy lab. From the case he extracted a small painting. The style we would all recognise instantly, it is the style of the country’s most famous painting; The Hay Wain. The painting in front of me was believed to be by Constable and it was my job to help prove it. If it was by Constable it would be worth approximately £5,000,000, so naturally my first job was to take a scalpel to it and remove flecks of the paint- no pressure! Once removed I used Raman spectroscopy (careful with the laser power, we don’t want to destroy the only sample we have!) to examine the pigments in the paint. It transpired that the pigments were the same as the ones typically used by Constable, one-step closer to verification…

The following day saw a Detective Sargent from Aberdeen arrive with two evidence bags containing some wood and cloth for me. My job was to discover whether there was any trace of human remains on them by use of SEM looking for human hair and GC-MS looking for fatty acids and decomposition products. I can’t tell you the outcome- it is currently going to trial, maybe in my next post…

The next couple of days were fairly bog standard. Continued work on a drug trial, stability testing of a new formulation for the treatment asthma, some thermal analysis for a long standing client specialising in traditional building restoration, analyse some unknown tablets seized by the police and give a couple of lectures to the second year forensic science students.

Friday saw me packing up a car with some portable Raman instrumentation and driving down to Southwell to work with archaeologists and art experts on the preservation of a fresco in the Saracen’s Head Hotel. The fresco dates back to the English civil war and is in the room that King Charles I was in when he surrendered to the Scottish Commissioners. Our job was to identify the pigments used in the fresco to enable restoration and preservation of this important piece of English heritage.

So that was my week; busy, exciting and all in all quite stressful. Analytical chemistry can be exciting, cutting edge and fun. True, I use the same techniques week after week but what changes is the application- and application is everything. I could have talked to you about how we are leading the search into life on Mars, a multi-billion pound project across several countries and agencies, maybe I will next time.