The Golden Jubilee year of The Chromatographic Society

If you are reading this book you are probably a chromatographer and perhaps have a career involving separation science. If not, you will learn of a branch of science to which many industries owe a considerable debt of gratitude. Much of our modern world relies on the action of complex mixtures of substances combined together, often in a unique way. Drugs are probably the most obvious of such formulations and the ability to separate and analyse these is essential to the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries. Chromatography is probably the best known of the branches of separation science. In 1954 a meeting on gas chromatography convened by A.F. Williams and W. Murray was held in Ardeer, Scotland at ICI Nobel Division. In 1956 the emergence of GC as a useful technique for the petroleum industry created a nucleus of scientists with a common interest in discovering its scope and developing it further. The first international symposium on chromatography was held in London in 1956 with the inspired support of Denis H. Desty, and his colleagues in the Hydrocarbon Research Group of the Institute of Petroleum. The past 50 years has seen the introduction and development of gas, liquid, supercritical fluid, capillary, preparative and numerous other variants of separation techniques that have become an indispensable part of the analytical chemist?s toolkit. When a technique is born, scientists want to discuss it, test it, apply it and make money from it. In order to encourage such discourses scientists crystallise into specialist interest groups and if sufficiently popular and useful these develop further into scientific societies. The Chromatographic Society has evolved from such roots. The Gas Chromatography Discussion Group was formed to organise, disseminate and promote interest and information exchange in this rapidly developing science. As the various methods of chromatographywere discovered and developed so the Discussion Group matured into what we now know as the Chromatographic Society.