This invention really holds water

At eight pounds a gallon, water has a way of making its presence felt when a scientist needs to lug large samples from a lake back to a laboratory for testing. So researchers around New York can thank John Hassett for figuring out a way to bring the laboratory to the lake.

UUPer Hassett, chair of the chemistry department at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, is the inventor of the beer-can-sized device known as “PISCES” (Passive In-Situ Concentration Extraction Sampler).

In its simplest definition, PISCES — for which Hassett received one of his two patents — works a little like a kitchen faucet water filter. PISCES is filled with an organic solvent and then suspended into the lake or river. There, it acts as a lure for organic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs — chemicals that were used as insulators for electrical equipment until the federal government banned them in 1979. Organic pollutants such as PCBs gravitate from the water into the solvent inside PISCES, much the same way they accumulate in the fatty tissues of fish.

PISCES can later be hauled up and carried to the laboratory for measuring and testing.

The state Department of Environ-mental Conservation (DEC) uses PISCES for water testing. And PISCES was field-tested in the Hudson River, early in the debate on whether General Electric should be forced to dredge PCBs from the Hudson.

Hassett, who liked to disassemble radios as a child, said he never expected his idea to become so popular with the DEC.

“Originally I had developed it as a research tool,” he said. “But on a car ride to Buffalo one day with a colleague from the DEC, he got all excited. He said, ‘This is what we need to track down contaminants in the water!’ That one took on a life of its own in the regulatory arena.”

— Darryl McGrath