Professor Harold M. McNair: A Life dedicated to separating chemical species and unifying the human beings.

Lanças, Fernando M.

Resumo: Harold Monroe McNair was born in Miami, Arizona (USA). He studied at the University of Arizona, Tucson, graduating with a BS degree (Magna cum Laude) in Chemistry in 1955. Shortly after, in 1957, he received his M.S. degree (with a thesis in electrochemistry), and in 1959 his Ph.D. degree (with a thesis on gas chromatography), both degrees in Analytical Chemistry from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. Shortly after, he spend one year as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the Eindhoven Technical University, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in the laboratories of Professor A. I. M. Keulemans. In this place he first met Marjike, the laboratory secretary that became his wife for the whole life. Harold uses to tell that Professor Keulemans knew very well how to select the most beautiful secretaries and the cleverest co-workers. Another secretary to work on this same laboratory was Mariet, who married Professor Karel Cramers, the successor of Professor Keulemans as the head of this laboratory. Asked recently in an interview who first influenced him to work with gas chromatography, Harold quickly listed Professor A.I.M. Keulemans, Dr. A.J.P. Martin (Nobel Prize in Chemistry) and Dr. Steve Dal Nogare. In a recent publication, he describes his experiences working together with these icons of chromatography[1].