New Haven chemical engineer wins national award for inventing instrument

Chemical Engineer Csaba Horváth of New Haven, Conn., will be honored April 3 by the world's largest scientific society for his pioneering role in developing technology to separate mixtures of compounds, an instrument found almost universally in laboratories today. He will receive the 2001 Award in Separations Science and Technology from the American Chemical Society at its national meeting in San Diego.

Colleagues have called Horváth, a professor of chemical engineering at Yale University, "the father of HPLC." Indeed, without high-performance liquid chromatography most analyses from basic research to drug development would be difficult if not impossible.

When Horváth began work at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, in 1963, "I saw biochemists spending 80 percent of their time or more doing separations rather than research itself," he said.

A method to separate gases, called gas chromatography, was already in use, particularly in the petroleum industry. Over the following years, Horváth was largely responsible for developing the technique for liquids.

Interestingly, his first subjects were moon rocks that astronauts had brought back for analysis. Thirty-five years later, "there would have been no golden decade of the pharmaceutical industry, no biotechnology without HPLC," said Horváth. Both fields require fast, highly efficient and - perhaps most critical - very reproducible analyses to purify drug products, conduct quality control, identify DNA sequences, and carry out a host of other applications.

Since winning his ACS award, Horváth has also received the 2001 Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities Award to recognize outstanding contributions to biomolecular technologies and applications. Previous winners include Nobel laureates Frederick Sanger and Bruce Merrifield. Bor

n in Szolnok, Hungary, Horváth was graduated from university four years before the Hungarian revolution in 1956. Originally wanting to be a lawyer or movie director, he ultimately chose chemical engineering "to have a job one could always do, and internationally, no matter what," he said. He emigrated first to Germany and then the United States, arriving in 1963.

Horváth received his undergraduate degree from the University of Technical Sciences, Budapest, in 1952 and his Ph.D. from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1963. He is a member of the ACS separations as well as industrial and engineering chemistry divisions.

The ACS Separations Science and Technology is sponsored by IBC Advanced Technologies, Inc. and Millipore Corp.