Well although he may have broken your rules, having more pre-oxidized carts is always a good thing...
Sorry, I can't agree, this is not a 'the end justifies the means' moment. This is 'loose cannon' action. Exceeding one's authority and possibly making a difficult (and expensive) research project invalid. It was not his job to do so it seems.
I know nothing of the details, of course, but if he did cleanly violate policy (which it seems) IMO his in line for time on the beach or being made available to the industry.....not knighthood.
Discipline is key in such cases, it's the company's eggs in the basket, not yours. Period. You take the man's money, you ride for the brand.
anyone in cali have access to one of these labs?
Probably no more than ten or 20 thousand folks? The gear is pretty common, gas chromatography has been a tool for a long time. It's used in Carbon dating for instance. And drug busts. And basic research. I use to use it's first cousin, RGA (Residual Gas Analyzer) routinely for finding vacuum leaks, had two in my shop, several more in the next building. You'd need to add a vacuum pump to do this job with that gear, but any one of these could have done this at least up to atomic masses in the low hundreds (would ID most metals). Machines with longer ranges abound.
I'd suggest asking the QC engineer for a reference?
I'm not sure what it would tell you you don't know besides stuff like confirming it's not machine oil, PG or VG (there'd be no 'crack products', random hydrocarbon bits, with metal oxides). And that there is nickle, iron and other metals in there.....
OF