In Memory of Professor Tsutomu Masujima —Scientist, Inventor and Friend

摘要

It was my first trip to Japan, and my colleague at the time, Dr. Michiko Kanai, carefully arranged my schedule so that we could attend each others presentations at a User Meeting and then meet to talk in person Photo 1 . Prof. Masujima s talk on single live cell metabolomics became one of those high- lights that actually make the whole trip worthwhile. Indeed, this new application pushed mass spectrometry to its very limits, especially on sensitivity and specificity. In the previous months, Michiko had helped Tsutomu to get an LTQ Orbitrap XL, the best Orbitrap instrument at the time, so that his group could use its sensitivity, high resolution and accurate mass to considerably advance their work relative to what was achiev- able using prior-generation instruments. However, it was clear that the single-cell analysis application created an urgent need for ever greater mass spectrometer performance, and this posed a great challenge to instrumentation developers like myself. So, I saw this as an opportunity for a collaboration that would challenge our mass spectrometers to the extreme and consequently benefit all other types of analysis as well.