Alexander Makarov
Director Global Research LSMS, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Bremen, Germany; Professor of High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry, Utrecht University, The Netherlands; and Fellow, Royal Society, UK
Qualities of an innovative thinker? A combination of phantasy and erudition to think outside of the box but not far enough to drown in the ocean of unrealizable ideas…
Making the most out of your invention…The most important thing is to create a team behind your invention! This is one of the main reasons for me to stay in industry: a multi-talented and a very versatile extended team that allows one to bring ideas into thousands of laboratories.
Picking a problem… It is always difficult and error-prone to decide which battles to fight – and, like in any battle, you need a bigger strategic goal to guide your direction, but also resources and capability to tackle the immediate challenge.
Biggest challenge facing the field? When it comes to mass spectrometry, I think that the generally insufficient rate of hardware miniaturization and commoditization is limiting expansion of this otherwise excellent technique!
Controversial opinion? I believe that the promise of the scandalously failed Theranos startup (providing full clinical analysis from a single droplet of blood) is fully realizable now – if only an appropriate combination of compact mass spectrometry with other methods could be employed…
