There are still a lot of things to say about all this. I will not reiterate my previous posts concerning the innovations in EPMA that have, in fact, been done in the last 20 years. I cannot really speak to the market situation in anywhere else in the world, including the growing market in Asia, but the US market has been interesting. Yes, the cost of ownership is a big factor, and companies that used to buy these machines largely do not do that anymore, more on that in a minute.
Our situation at UMass is probably not uncommon, so this is what I have seen: NSF made a paradigm switch over the last 10-15 years toward largely investing in large facilities with multi-year support, like IRIS, the UCLA National Ion Microprobe, GeoSoilEnviroCARS, Institute for Rock Magnetism, accelerator PRIME lab, Continental Drilling Office, and a number of others that eat up tens of millions of dollars in multi-year support. This meant less funding for individual lab acquisitions, much to the dismay of a number of people at NSF! The NSF EAR IF upper limit went down and down to the point where acquisitions like EPMAs had to go through the MRI program, and just to get an MRI off campus is a difficult, usually several year process. So NSF shifted EPMA acquisitions mostly into regional labs (with some exceptions) rather than individual campuses. When I started 25 years ago, NSF EAR IF was really about getting as much equipment into as many labs, on as many campuses as possible, so this was a big change. Meanwhile, universities have seen unprecedented growth in spending on a rapid expansion of the administration – this has been shocking at UMass, and I know other places. How does this tie in? Well, spending on campus laboratory and facility support has gone down, with more centralization to minimize staff, making staff more soft money supported, and encouraging self-supporting models for laboratories. Revenue from academic grants has gone down also, and is highly inconsistent as funding rates decrease, and analytical budgets in grants goes down. Some manifestations of this include the encouragement by the administration to 1) set up collaborations with commercial entities, like Big Pharma, and 2) figure out ways of getting commercial users into university laboratories. At UMass, this has included the implementation of a voucher program to lure in commercial clients. We have moved from cost centers to revenue centers - but we actually call these revenue centers cost centers with cost recovery through revenue generation because we are still, after all, non-profit.
What the companies see is that there is a better way for them to get what they need done by using these university laboratories rather than buy an instrument, hire expert staff, and buy a service agreement. It is way more cost effective to have a university take on the support and just pay an hourly price (at an approved commercial rate) for analyses. This means labs may spend a tremendous amount of time running things for commercial customers, and less and less time fulfilling our educational mission. I recently saw an ad for an XRF manager/technician for a university that just flat out said that this involved two XRF instruments, one for general use, and the other for a commercial machine evidently dedicated to use for their commercial users. Sadly, the university administration may not care as much about compromising the educational mission of laboratories compared to just the pure revenue you might be able to generate – of course they take a cut out of the budget for “administrative charges”. And, of course, one big picture aspect of the entire approach by the administration has to do with attracting big corporate or individual donors for whom we can name buildings or schools after.
This laboratory support model does not encourage experimentation or innovation. It also has meant that fewer and fewer students will dedicate a good portion of their academic careers to learning things like EPMA in a way that is not purely just a service. For a lot of the campus work we do, it is now much more likely that we will do something here and there as a service arrangement where the students involved will not do anything more than bring samples over.
Twenty years ago, NSF EAR IF was very receptive to ideas involving innovation. The word that we got was that there were too few risks being taken. The Ultrachron project was enthusiastically supported because there was risk to innovate, and to develop such innovation through a collaboration between UMass, Cameca and NSF was perfect. Instead of just buying something off the shelf, what could you do that might be new and of potential benefit to both the scientific community as well as the company? Seems like this is less much likely to happen now, even though there are still some very good and well-intentioned people at NSF.
Sorry for the long Sunday diatribe, but to me, if this is the demise of EPMA, it has been a community effort that involves a lot more than just the perceived shortcomings of Cameca and JEOL. In the US anyway, a lot of us using this forum have to remember that WE ARE NSF. As ad-hoc proposal reviewers or panelists, we participate in the process. It will only change when we make it change.
We depend on your feedback and ideas!