Erika Cremer (1900-1996) deserved the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her pioneering work in independently developing the process of solid-state gas adsorption chromatography in 1944-45 in Innsbruck, Austria (then part of Nazi Germany). In the spring of 1945 Cremer’s preliminary report on the technique was in press in what would have been the last issue before the end of the war of Naturwissenschaften, the German version of Science. Unfortunately the press was bombed and the plates destroyed before it could be printed. Although Cremer’s laboratory was also bombed and unusable for some time after the war, her graduate student Fritz Prior, working under her direction in a nearby high school laboratory, successfully tested her ideas by building a primitive gas chromatography device in 1946-47 as part of his PhD research. But postwar problems with German journals and overall limitations on scientific communications delayed their publications until 1951, and unfortunately they remained obscure for several years, even among German-speaking chemists. Meanwhile the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1952 was awarded jointly to the British chemists A. J. P. Martin and R. L. M. Synge for their invention of liquid partition chromatography during the early 1940s; although Martin and A.T. James followed up on this by developing gas-liquid chromatography in 1950-52, Cremer’s earlier independent work on solid-state gas adsorption chromatography, had it been known at the time, could have justified a third share of the 1952 prize for her. This paper will be based on published sources and on the author's interview with Erika Cremer in 1994.

Erika Cremer and the origins of solid state gas chromatography, 1944-1947

254th National Meeting (2017)

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