Chromatography Forum

How do you feel about Pittcon 2010?

My feelings are: too many "sale" presentations from vendors, too little talks with high value, poorly organized, and decreased attendees. I have seen many talks with only 10 to 20 listeners.

ASMS is better.

ASMS is better.

Assuming you are doing MS!

PittCon has always been, first and foremost, a trade show to which people come to see the latest hardware "in person". The majority of the vendors send (at least some) technical people to the meeting, and you can walk around the exbibit floor and get specific questions answered (reasonably) accurately. The "scientific meeting" part has always been secondary. I've presented a number of papers at PittCon over the years (as a vendor), and always made sure they contained useful information and were geared toward a non-specialist audience.

Attendance this year was just under 17,000; that's about half of the peak in the late 90's. Interestingly enough, the ratio of "conferees" (aka "customers") to exhibitors seemed to be a bit higher this year than in the past (historically, it's been near 50/50). I suspect that a big part of the decline is due to the availability of other venues (like this Forum, for example) for information exchange.

I don't think the organization was any worse than it has been in the past (17,000 is still a *lot* of people!). If you want the "cutting" edge in a specific field, there are better meetings (ASMS for mass spec, the HPLC xx series for chromatography, for example). If you want a broad overview under one roof, then PittCon (in the US) or Analytica (in Europe). In fact, it has been suggested that PittCon should go to every other year, alternating with Analytica.

Tom, Thanks for the reply.

I am doing both MS and other spectroscopic techniques. The meetings I used to go are Pittcon and FACCS, not ASMS.

In fact I went to an oral session chaired by Dr. Synder and speakers included John Dolan, the room was full. From this point, I don't think those are "vendor" talks. I considered vendor talks as those coming directly from a manufacture who sells the instrument used in the presenstations, cleary, it's hard to get unbiased informtion from those talks. For example, I went to a vendor talk about pesticide measurement in food, because they don't sell GC-MS/MS, they never mentioned this technique as one of populars for this purpose.

My impression was that at many booths there are more exhibitors than visitors.

I fully agree that Pittcon needs go every two years.

There are a lot of new people on the committes this year, the Pittcon organization has brought in a lot of new blood, which I see as a very postive change. There were some rough edges due to a lot of the people not having trade show experience, especially in a show this size. I expect things to run a little smoother next year since the new people will have this year's experience to learn from.

Pittcon has always been a vendor show, and the scientific portion has been secondary. I actually did not see a decrease in overall quality this year.

A vendor talk is always going to focus on what the vendor has to offer. If a company sells only single quad mass spectrometers don't expect the talks from that vendor to sing the praises of tandem mass spectrometry. The purpose of a vendor talk is to highlight the capabilities of what they sell, not to tell the world there may be better ways to do an analysis using equipment they don't sell. If you think about it, this is a form of corporate suicide. If the question arises during a question and answer part of the session the presenter is obligated to give a fair evaluate of the merits of each technique.

In my years of giving presentations and chairing sessions my experience has been that when there is a mix of vendor presentations and university presentations in a session the university presentations are not always the the strongest technically, they are many times weaker technically than some of the vendor presentations. In the interest of full disclosure I do work in the industry and have for many years, after several years in university based research institutes.

If you are on the prowl for new things to look at, then in my opinion, there is no better place than Pittcon. On the one hand there are vendors who are presenting their solutions to problems that may or may not apply directly to what you are doing but certainly give you a different view of available instrumentation. On the other, there are academic presentations that present you the potential next wave (or ripple) of analytical technology which, again, may or may not directly apply.

Regarding small attendance at sessions: you only have 20 minutes (in most cases) to present your information, so you have to narrow down the subject matter. If you narrow down the subject matter, how many people will end up interested? Then you might have to compete with another session which is also talking about GC (for example) at the same time. Ten or 20 people might be a really good crowd after those filters.

I worry about not having any new ideas rolling around in my head and I am always refreshed by Pittcon.

My disclaimer is that I have never been to Analytica so my apologies to the Europeans in advance. I hope this will soon change.

Best regards.