I was happy to see the article in your Spring issue regarding Seymour Lipsky [Building a Better Mousetrap (and Mouse), Yale Medicine, Spring 2014]. The picture, however, should have been dated 1958 and the caption should have stated that the research being done at that time and through the early 1960s was the development of gas chromatography.
I was a colleague of Dr. Lipsky during those years and co-authored about 20 research papers with Dr. Lipsky and such others as James Lovelock in the development of this new technique. I also used the technique in collaboration with Dr. Lou Gluck in his search to identify the surfactant material in the lungs of newborns.
So thank you for reviving some old memories for me.
Robert A. Landowne, Ph.D. ’58
Westport, Conn.
Thanks to Dr. Landowne for clarifying and adding to the record of this historic achievement. The photograph is indeed from 1958 and shows instrumentation for gas chromatography, an advance that contributed to the development of a related method, high-performance liquid chromatography, in the 1960s.