ABSTRACT
I. HOW I BECAME INVOLVED IN SEPARATION SCIENCE I entered the world of separation science, chromatography, and electrophoresis in the late fifties. I was then ending my studies at the Prague Institute of Chemical Technology where the experimental work I prepared for my thesis was titled "Chromatographic Analysis of Waste Waters from a TNT-Producing Plant" (as a matter of fact this was the same plant that much later became the world-famous producer of Semtex explosives) [1]. At that time the practised separation technology was predominantly paper chromatography and indeed it flourished in Prague. Though the first monograph on chromatography that came into my hands was that of Lederer and Lederer [2], the first monograph exclusively on paper chromatography was published in Prague by Ivo Hais and Karel Macek (with whom we became close friends in the late 1960s) [3]. The reason was simple: a sufficiently large jar (frequently those used for selling pickled cucumbers which could be obtained for free from any grocery store), solvents, some reagents, and a sheet of Whatman paper (at the very beginning also regular filter paper treated by mysterious procedures) was all that what was needed to do research in this field (admittedly also some brains). Soon a number of printed bibliographies on this subject [4-7] became available to me.
