Editorial

Extract

At the beginning of every year, we all have the opportunity to look both ways – past and future – as the Roman god, Janus, can do. Recently, a gift allowed this Editor that opportunity in a rare and special way. The gift would warm the heart of any editor or historian – a copy of Volume 1, Number 1 of the official publication of the American Society of Clinical Laboratory Technicians published in November, 1934. While the initial instinct was to wait until an anniversary to speak about the past and the present, one item was simply too timely. In the second of a series of editorials from the editorial board, Dr Walter E King, a pathologist from Michigan stated, “It is now well recognized that the specialized training of the technician is of as much importance to the physician as is the professional training of the pharmacist who fills his prescriptions and that of the nurse who carries out his orders in the sick room and in the hospital ward. Proper recognition of the important work of the laboratory technicians, the standardization of courses of training for student technicians, and official licensure, definitely point to the position which this work is to occupy in medicine. Destiny has decreed that clinical laboratory technique shall become recognized as one of the true professional vocations”.

Well, it is now near to seventy years since those words were spoken. How far have we come in fulfilling destiny? True, we have standardized the…