50 years of HPLC

For some chromatographers, their first inkling that high-performance liquid chromatography was going to be a big deal came in 1969. That year, they traveled to Las Vegas to attend the fifth in a series of meetings organized by University of Houston chemist Albert Zlatkis. Earlier meetings in the “Advances in Chromatography” series had focused on gas chromatography, which separates volatile compounds in a mixture as it passes through a gas-filled column. So, many of the attendees at that meeting in 1969 were GC experts who hadn’t heard much about the technique that was to become HPLC. They were in for an awakening. “That meeting was pivotal in terms of really giving a jump start to HPLC,” says Ronald Majors, who was in attendance. After hearing about the still-nascent technique, “everybody got really excited.” GC was still the dominant separation technology at the time. But GC had its drawbacks. Most important,