by Elizabeth Zubritsky

f there's one thing Jim Jorgenson hates to hear, it's "That will never work." This is a man who speaks casually about working with a million volts of electricity. A man who has subjected Teflon to such intense pressure that he's made it shrink. He's too busy pushing chemistry to new extremes to listen to naysayers.

"I've never been very interested in doing incremental science," Jorgenson confesses. "I like to take off a big bite—an absurdly large one. And when it works, it's fun because eventually people go from the stage of disbelief to saying, 'Well now, that is interesting.'"

At first, you might not expect to hear Jorgenson's chosen field, analytical chemistry, described as extreme. Analytical chemists analyze compounds. If you ever were handed a beaker full of something in a chemistry lab and told to figure out what it was, you were doing analytical chemistry. It's meticulous. It's methodical. It's not as if these researchers are doing something glamorous, such as sequencing the entire human genome.

Not so fast. Although biologists sequenced the human genome, analytical chemists developed the technology that performed the sequencing in record time. And it began with a technique called capillary electrophoresis (CE), which separates small-volume samples inside tiny capillary tubes and is Jorgenson's claim to fame.

Jorgenson became interested in chemical separations as a senior at Northern Illinois University. Thanks to a professor named Peter Daum, Jorgenson was already intrigued by analytical chemistry. "I've always had an interest in electronics, radio, biology, and a whole variety of areas of science," Jorgenson explains. "This was a way to play in all those areas."

Then, on a visit to the graduate school at Indiana University at Bloomington, Jorgenson met Milos Novotny. Novotny was separating mixtures of gases—for example, analyzing cigarette smoke to identify the potentially carcinogenic compounds. "Novotny's lab was doing fantastic things," Jorgenson says. Whereas most researchers could isolate 20 or 30 compounds, Novotny could isolate hundreds.

he difference was that Novotny had figured out how to make chromatography, the standard approach for analyzing mixtures of gases or liquids, better. Chromatography is a sieving process that separates a mixture into its components. You load a sample onto a "column"—which literally might be a vertical cylinder filled with tiny beads or other sieving material—and some molecules exit the column quickly while others are delayed. For example, small molecules might pass through immediately, while large molecules are delayed. Or the separation might depend on the shapes of the molecules or on "bait" molecules binding to partners.

The key to success is to get the components to exit the column one at a time. If two or more components leave together, one of them might be invisible, or the combination might be mistaken for something else. Novotny realized that by using a tiny capillary tube instead of a big column for gas chromatography (GC), he could improve the performance by a factor of 10.

Seeing Novotny's dramatic results, Jorgenson was hooked. "It was like having a telescope that was suddenly ten times more powerful than all the existing telescopes," he exclaims. "It opened up whole new worlds—in this case, new chemical worlds." In 1974, he joined Novotny's lab, where he was so prolific that his success has become legendary among his students.

But Jorgenson cautions students not to focus too much on success. Instead, he encourages students to learn something from each experiment—including those that fail—and to enjoy the process. And he tries to foster in them a sense of playfulness and wild experimentation, even joining their dart games in the lab.

Next: a field is born

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