Reference Materials for Environmental Analysis: Rising to the Challenge

摘要

Using reference materials to validate and control analytical procedures is not new: the first recorded use of what we would now recognise as a reference material was in 1824 by Gay-Lussac. Just 100 years ago the US NBS released a reference material program, developed in partnership with the US iron and steel industry, to bring uniform quality to steel and iron produced in the USA. Some of those first "SRMs" are still available from NIST, for example SRM 4L, Cast Iron Chips Certified for Trace Elements is in its 12th lot since the early 1900s! Over the last 100 years a number of measurement communities embraced the routine use of reference materials, including the pharmaceutical industry in the 1930s, the geological sector, through the work of the United States Geological Survey in the 1950s, the hospital pathology sector in the 1970s, the environmental market in the late 1980s and most recently the biotech sector at the turn of this Century. In each case the driver that resulted in the widespread adoption of reference materials was, directly or indirectly, regulation.