M. S. Tsvet: from birth to recognition

Abstract

The article describes the life and work of the father of chromatography - Mikhail Tsvet. This year we celebrated his 150th anniversary. A workshop “Sorption and chromatography” held by Voronezh State University between 11 and 13 of May was dedicated to this anniversary. The article presents an abridged version of the report made at the workshop. It started with a tragic event at the very beginning of Mikhail Tsvet’s life. His mother died during childbirth. His father, Semen Tsvet, was a highly educated and artistic person, who contributed a lot to the development of the future scientist. Tsvet spent his childhood and youth in Switzerland. He defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Geneva in 1896. However, the degree was not recognised in Russia until 1901, and he could not find a permanent job. He started working at the University of Warsaw in 1901. Despite the severe conditions, he continued his research which eventually resulted in the development of the dynamic adsorption method for the separation of plant pigments. He was the first to separate the most important (according to Darwin) substances - chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b, which are sources of life on Earth. The article also presents a methodological analysis of his first works on chromatography. They were not recognised by the scientific community in his lifetime, and therefore he could not find a good job and his eyesight started to deteriorate. He spent the last years of his life in Voronezh and was buried here in 1919. His contribution was only recognised by the next generation of scientists, and a lot of Nobel Prize laureates paid tribute to the method devised by M.S. Tsvet. Nowadays, international conferences and symposiums are dedicated to his anniversaries as well as the anniversaries of the invention of chromatography. For instance, the 100th anniversary of chromatography in 2003 was marked by symposiums and conferences in Voronezh, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, and New York. Honorary medals were produced in the USA and presented to 51 leading chromatography scholars. Works by Mikhail Tsvet were published by the president of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR S.I. Vavilov in a series “Classics of Science” together with works by Isaac Newton.