The first Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) facility in Africa was officially launched by Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor on July 7. The facility is located at the iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Sciences (iThemba LABS) Gauteng unit, on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “One of the things we need to do in our country is to invest in human capital in science and technology,” she said. “We have a strong concern about human capital development.” This included training scientists from elsewhere in Africa and elsewhere in the world.
It was also necessary, she stated, to ensure that South African researchers had the required equipment and facilities to do “exciting research in this country”. It was essential for the country and for Africa that South Africa invest in scientific infrastructure. By doing so, the country would support the development of the entire continent and have a global impact. Experience on the MeerKAT radio telescope array programme had revealed that the country also needed to train technicians to maintain advanced scientific equipment and instruments.
“In the Department of Science and Technology [DST] we have a Ten-Year Innovation Plan. We have set some ambitious goals. They are all aimed at turning South Africa into what we hope will be a vibrant knowledge-based society,” she affirmed. “The DST is working on a number of interventions to improve our science and technology infrastructure. My first instruction on [again] becoming Minister [of Science and Technology] was – let’s look at the architecture of science in the country.”
The DST already, through the National Research Foundation (NRF), operates a “vibrant” national equipment programme which, since 2005, has acquired more than 300 examples of state-of-the-art research equipment, which have been placed at various South African universities. Some 3 000 scientific publications have resulted from research using this equipment. “The AMS facility is only one of the facilities supported through the NRF national equipment programme,” she noted.
She highlighted that the AMS would allow scientists from South Africa, Africa and the rest of the world to undertake world-class research and development in a large number of fields. In particular, global and regional climate change, the characterisation of regional groundwater systems, palaeoanthropology, archaeology, history and preservation technology, earth sciences, AMS in biomedical dosimetry and qualifying therapeutic drugs.
In physics, an accelerator is a machine that accelerates charged particles, up to very high speeds and energies, although there can also be lower energy options (as in the case of the AMS). Use of an accelerator in mass spectrometry makes the identification of trace isotopes – most famously, Carbon-14, used in radiocarbon dating – much easier.
“AMS is one of the most versatile analytical tools to investigate our environment at large,” pointed out Professor (emeritus) Walter Kutschera, former director of Austria’s Vienna Environmental Research Accelerator (VERA), at the launch of the new South African facility. “AMS allows a large variety of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research, particularly also between science and the humanities [for example, archaeology].”
“With AMS it is possible to trace rare and long-lived isotopes in essentially every domain of our environment,” he stated. He listed these domains as the atmosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere (seas, lakes, rivers), the cryosphere (ice sheets, glaciers and so on), the lithosphere (the outermost shell of the earth, or of any other rocky planet), the technosphere (all human activities and constructs) and even the cosmosphere (everything from beyond the earth, such as meteorites; but AMS has been done on moon rock samples). When it comes to isolating and identifying isotopes that researchers are interested in, “AMS allows enormous selectivity”.
Kutschera was responsible for the establish-ment of VERA in 1996. Since then, the facility has twice been upgraded, in 2001 and 2007.