ABSTRACT
My involvement in chromatography started in 1969 by mere coincidence. I had been educated in chemistry at Tubingen University in Germany. I joined the group of Ernst Bayer in the Department of Organic Chemistry in 1966, yet my thesis work was purely inorganic, i.e., nitrogen fixation and reduction to ammonia with titanium catalysts [1,2]. This challenging topic, i.e., to conduct the Haber-Bosch process under physiological conditions as done by nature, is still elusive at the beginning of the new millennium. My supervisor Ernst Bayer embarked on a very broad spectrum of scientific endeavors [3]. His experiments on the extraction of gold from seawater, revisiting the unsuccessful experiments of Nobel laureate Fritz Haber after World War One in an effort to ease Germany's war debts, earned him a Robert A. Welch professorship at the University of Houston in Texas. At about the same time Emanuel Gil-Av (Zimkin) [4,5] worked together with Binyamin Feibush and Rosita Charles-Sigler at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, on another highly challenging topic, namely on the separation of optical isomers (enantiomers) employing chiral amino acid derivatives as chiral stationary phases (CSPs) by gas chromatography. According to Emanuel Gil-Av [6], this topic was in 1966 in "a state of frustration: nobody believed it could be done. In fact, people were convinced that there could not possibly be a large enough difference in the interaction between the D-and L-solute with an asymmetric solvent. This was the feeling people had, even those known as unorthodox thinkers." Nowadays the situation is almost reversed. There are only very few classes of chiral compounds that are not yet amenable to separation into enantiomers by chromatography. However, the way to this significant achievement of separation science has been cumbersome, at least in the experience of the present author.
