Some things are just meant to be, apparently. Sept. 23, 2014, marked an interesting waypoint in the career of someone concerned about standards of measurement, because on that day, I became a standard reference human.
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Having started working for the (then) National Bureau of Standards (NBS) almost 28 years ago, this seems to me to be a significant achievement. For those who don’t know, NBS is the predecessor to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Commerce Dept. that promotes measurement standards and conducts scientifc research. NIST is also the home of the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, and the Advanced Manufacturing National Program Office, an interagency team with participation from all federal agencies involved in U.S. manufacturing.
Among NIST’s major functions are the things we do related to standards—standard reference materials, standard reference data, and calibration services. Standard reference data have been a part of NIST and NBS since before 1969, when Congress first gave NBS an appropriation for it. SRD means quantitative information, related to a measurable physical or chemical property of a substance or system of substances of known composition and structure, which is critically evaluated as to its reliability. Calibration services are exactly what they sound like. Companies send machines to NIST for comparison against known standards and adjustments are made to the equipment so that the outputs fall within precision and accuracy guidelines.
Standard reference materials include a number of items, such as:
1. Pure substances, which are essentially pure chemicals, characterized for chemical purity and/or trace impurities
2. Standard solutions and gas mixtures
3. Matrix reference materials, characterized for the composition of specified major, minor, or trace chemical constituents
4. Physical-chemical reference materials, characterized for properties such as melting point, viscosity, or optical density
5. Reference objects or artifacts, characterized for functional properties such as dimensions, octane number, and hardness
The latter category includes some of the work the NIST Engineering Laboratory is doing in additive manufacturing to help everyone make sure that what the equipment manufacturers say you can do are, in fact, things you can do. It’s also the category that now includes me.
How did you become a standard reference human, you might ask? A combination of luck and coincidence. A number of years ago, I entered a research study at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) related to DNA and heart disease, and yes, there is a family history of these ailments that I can trace back at least three generations. As a result of that study, I ended up having coronary bypass surgery and simultaneously scaring the bejeezus out of most of the MEP staff (to the point that they joined the study, too).
A follow-up study starting two years ago used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look at whether there was any correlation between the dose of the medication I’m on for high cholesterol and the thickness of my carotid artery wall. It also included a pair of computed tomography (CT) scans of my heart. My part of that study ended last month. By coincidence, the NIH had recently acquired a new CT machine with a lower radiation profile. The team at the NIH was looking for a statistically significant number of people, in this case about 30, with recent CT scans who could come back within 30 days to have new scans done with the new machine to compare to the results. I could and did. There are a number of unique features in my chest due to the bypass (including the titanium wire that held my sternum together post-surgery) that should add to the ability of the NIH research team to compare images and match features.
The follow-up process included an MRI and three different CT scans using different levels of the dye contrast agent to see just how low the radiation and contrast agent levels could be. Scarily, I could tell that they were using different levels of the contrast agent. (If you’ve ever had one, the body exhibits a particular response to it. If not, don’t worry about it.) My hope is that the lower radiation provides a comparable result, as less exposure to radiation is almost always a good thing.
Because the images are being used to compare the outputs of the two CT machines, that makes me a standard reference human. For an NBS guy, that’s a big accomplishment!
First published Oct. 24, 2014, on the Manufacturing Innovation blog.
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