  We introduce a family of operations in quantum mechanics that one can regard
as "universal quantum measurements" (UQMs). These measurements are applicable
to all finite-dimensional quantum systems and entail the specification of only
a minimal amount of structure. The first class of UQM that we consider involves
the specification of the initial state of the system---no further structure is
brought into play. We call operations of this type "tomographic measurements",
since given the statistics of the outcomes one can deduce the original state of
the system. Next, we construct a disentangling operation, the outcome of which,
when the procedure is applied to a general mixed state of an entangled
composite system, is a disentangled product of pure constituent states. This
operation exists whenever the dimension of the Hilbert space is not a prime,
and can be used to model the decay of a composite system. As another example,
we show how one can make a measurement of the direction along which the spin of
a particle of spin s is oriented (s = 1/2, 1, ...). The required additional
structure in this case involves the embedding of CP(1) as a rational curve of
degree 2s in CP(2s).
