Abstract
Countercurrent Chromatography and Countercurrent Distribution
I read with great interest the report of Napolitano et al. 1 in the February, 2009 issue of JALA concerning countercurrent chromatography (CCC), because I had the privilege more than 40 years ago of briefly working in the laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) of Dr. Lyman C. Craig, the inventor of countercurrent distribution (CCD), the predecessor technology to CCC. 2 4 These two technologies are virtually identical except for the mechanical sophistication. Each system provides for sequential partitions of a solute between a stationary solvent phase and a mobile solvent phase. It is understandable that the authors would not have known of Dr. Craig's work because it would not appear in current searchable databases.
Dr. Craig was world renowned for his developments in extraction, dialysis, partition chromatography, microdistillation, fractional distillation, thin film countercurrent dialysis, and for the invention of CCD. A brief perusal of his more than 70 publications in American Chemical Society journals revealed that CCD had been used in the purification of albumin, lysozyme, ribonuclease, insulin, Bacitracin A, parathyroid hormone, Bence-Jones protein, hemoglobin, and many more substances. Many scientists at that time believed that he should have been awarded a Nobel Prize. However, in his day, it was hard to compete with Watson & Crick, Ochoa & Kornberg, and many others for the prize in medicine, or with Linus Pauling, Melvin Calvin, Frederick Sanger, or Willard Libby for the prize in chemistry.
Dr. Craig's CCD techniques and machines were clearly the predecessor to CCC. My own visit to Dr. Craig's laboratory was with my graduate school advisor, Howard Rasmussen, who was the first to purify bovine parathyroid hormone as a graduate student under Dr. Craig. 5 On our visit to the Rockefeller Institute in 1967, we attempted to purify porcine thyrocalcitonin 6 (now calcitonin) using Dr. Craig's 1000-tube CCD machine, a marvel to just look at. Building such a machine kept a glassblower busy for months. Performing 1000 transfers with this machine required nearly three full days. Unfortunately, we did not achieve the purification of thyrocalcitonin with CCD and thus resorted to chromatography with two different gel filtration systems and one ion exchange system. 6
In future publications about CCC the authors should cite Dr. Craig's invention of CCD.
Author's Response
Thank you for pointing out the references to early CCD/CCC work. We will be sure to include them in any future publications on the topic.