Dear All,
At ENC the NRC presented a report with a Congressional request for a federal budget line to fund three 1.2 GHz NMR spectrometers around the US. The estimated cost of the 1.2 GHz ($24 million), building and support staff is $50M each. As Rich Shoemaker pointed out that is 200 console upgrades or 35 600 MHz DNP systems. The NSF would like to hear our opinion. We wrote a draft letter to send to your faculty. The NSF email address is MAGNET_at_NSF.GOV. The link to the NRC report is also in the draft letter.
As someone from Europe pointed out, the magnet community in the Eurozone benefited from the 1 GHz installation in Lyon, France in general. However, we have lost the best funding mechanism we had for instrument upgrades, the NSF CRIF. We have to compete for the NSF MRI to fund a console or gather three PIs with NIH funding to write an NIH SIG. The best luck that I have had in upgrading old instrument has been through internal university resources.
Please consider circulating this letter and emailing MAGNET_at_NSF.GOV with your response. If you have a federal liaison officer on campus, please include them in this loop.
Best Regards,
Martha
Martha Morton, PhD
Director of Research Instrumentation
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Department of Chemistry
834 Hamilton Hall
Lincoln, NE 68588-0304
402-472-6255
Dear Colleagues,
The National Resource Council is asking for the federal programs, predominately NIH and NSF, to find a funding line to the tune of about $50,000,000 to support at least three 1.2 GHz NMR spectrometers at centrally located facilities across the US. The NIH HEI program does not even begin to fund these types of facilities. There is a need for DNP systems across the US and a 20 T imaging system (technical issues aside) as well. This report can be found at
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18355 . Support for these initiatives is important.
Though the NRC report covers a portion of the NMR interest, there is little or no consideration for the state of NMR at lower fields. Our university labs are made up of aging equipment that cannot run state-of-the-art experiments and are approaching the end of their usable lifetime. This aging has been complicated by the shutdown of the NSF CRIF program. Our funding sources are the NIH SIG and NSF MRI programs. The highly competitive nature of the MRI program at the university level precludes the accessibility by Chemistry departments to keep NMR spectrometers alive. Many university communities have not adapted their internal granting procedures to the loss of the CRIF program, which was dedicated to basic Chemistry resources. To create awareness of this need, we suggest several steps:
1. We need to create the awareness in our departments, at our universities, and to our state and US congressmen that NMR is crucial to the technological training of students in organic chemistry, biological and health related research, materials science and food science.
2. The majority of NMR instruments have been funded through federal government funding sources to support basic organic and biochemistry related research. These instruments are aging with average age according to Linkedin surveys by Josh Kurutz in February 2013 of 12 years.
3. The funding sources for new NMR spectrometers and re-consoling old NMR spectrometers has mostly dried up with the loss of the NSF CRIF program.
4. Helium resources are crucial to keep these low temperature superconducting magnets working. There have been two major liquid helium shortages: July 2012 and September 2013. To protect our current instrumentation, large NMR research facilities NEED helium reliquification facilities to protect these instruments. A congressional decision in 1996 to sell off helium reserves and privatize helium distribution make the protection of these resources crucial. The Helium Resource Act of 2013 mitigates the immediate impact of the helium crisis, but does not solve the long term problem.
5. High Temperature Superconducting magnets (HTS) should replace the LTS magnets as soon as this can be technically and economically reasonable.
Please consider passing these concerns on to your faculty, university and state and federal congressmen. In addition, NSF has asked for comments on the NRC report, which can be sent to magnet_at_nsf.gov<mailto:magnet_at_nsf.gov>. Our concerns can be sent to this address.
Received on Wed Apr 09 2014 - 05:34:27 MST