PLASTICS‐IRRADIATED‐ETCHED: THE NUCLEPORE® FILTER TURNS 45 YEARS OLD

Abstract

It has been said that progress in aquatic sciences is limited by the availability of methods that can be used to observe and describe characteristics, features and processes in freshwater, estuarine and marine habitats.Many key discoveries in limnology and oceanography can be traced to inventions of new tools, instruments or technologies that are often borrowed from unrelated disciplines.Some of these are used so often in our day-to-day research activities that we rarely think about their origins, or what life must have been like before they existed.This article will recount the important steps, from theory to practice, in the development of an indispensable tool of our trade, the Nuclepore ® membrane filter.In a series of high-profile scientific publications during the period 1962-1965, including four front covers of Science magazine (Figure 1), a team of physicists and engineers from the General Electric Research Laboratory (GERL) in Schenectady, New York invented and perfected a novel Plastics-Irradiated-Etched ("PIE") membrane, the predecessor to the commercially available Nuclepore ® filter.The introduction of this "precision" plastic sieve facilitated the development of many new methodologies, especially in the fields of aquatic chemistry and microbiology.I thank two of the inventors, Professors

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