By Patrice Sutton<
A woman is brought into a Bay Area hospital. She’s having seizures, and lapses into a coma before she can tell anyone what happened to her. Her family reports that she used herbal sleep aids.
Could she have accidentally overdosed? Knowing the true cause behind the coma is critical. Giving the wrong antidote to a toxic substance can have potentially fatal consequences.
The clock was ticking. A sample of the patient’s blood and the suspect herbal remedy was sent to a lab at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH), where Dr. Roy Roberto Gerona set about analyzing it.
Dr. Gerona has been using UCSF’s time of flight mass spectrometer to solve mysterious cases referred to him by the Poison Control Center over the past two years.
A molecule’s “time of flight” is literally the length of time it takes for a molecule that is tossed up into the air inside a mass spectrometer to fall a given distance. That information provides Gerona with critical information about a chemical’s identity.