Strange places to find a chromatographer, Part III: Climbing the Everest

No, she is not measuring the level of Ozone there with a portable GC, she likes to climb.

Frau Meyer is an author of a well known chromatography book: Practical High-Performance Liquid Chromatograph (which I used in university by the way), several papers dealing with uncertainty, acetonitrile detoxication and more. She is also a research from EMPA. None of this impressed me more than know that she got a valve on heart and had climbed all the Seven Summits, The highest mountains in each continent!

She kindly answered some questions. Take a look:

How did you put this goal in your life, it was planned? I mean the 7 peaks?

No, it was not planned. The idea of Seven Summits was first presented by Dick Bass, end of the Eighties. I liked the idea but I was convinced that most of these mountains are out of my reach. So far I had only climbed in the Alps, however, a lot! But then I grasped every occasion when I saw that I could participate in an expedition to one of the Seven Summits. By the end of 2001 I had climbed six of them (and Denali and Vinson were not easy), so I asked a Swiss expedition leader, Mr. Kari Kobler, if he would accept me as an expedition member to Everest. He did, but it took me five attempts (2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007) to finally reach the top on May 16, 2007.

Do you think in job when you are in the mountains?

Most of the time I don't. But sometimes I get a good idea when I am in Nature (also when climbing a mountain in Switzerland). In addition, when you go on expedition to Everest or another really high peak you must be aware that there will be resting days. Sometimes you need to wait for a week or longer due to the weather. Therefore I always took a little bit of work when going to a long expedition. E.g., once I updated the paragraph about sample injectors for my book "Practical HPLC" (in Everest basecamp) and once I worked on a paper about the uncertainty of weighing operations.

Beyond books is there any publication you could stress like, very important? Or had more impact?

In fact, I cannot judge the impact my HPLC books have, although I think that really many people use and like them. Besides the books, there are (at least) two papers of mine which generated some impact:

Richard Däppen, Hans Arm, Veronika R. Meyer

Applications and limitations of commercially available chiral stationary phases for high-performance liquid chromatography. J. Chromatogr. 373 (1986) 1-20

This paper got 114 citations until now.

Veronika R. Meyer

High-performance liquid chromatographic theory for the practitioner

J. Chromatogr. 334 (1985) 197-209

This was one of my first papers. In these years it was usual to send a postcard to the author if you were interested in a paper and wanted a reprint. I got over 600 of these cards! It was cited 33 times until now.

How do you see education in chromatography today? What are the ways to achieve proficiency in your opinion?

I am convinced that you need a sound theoretical background besides the practical training. You will not master HPLC (or any other field) after a short introduction of the kind "here is the instrument, just inject your samples and use a C18 column with water/acetonitrile, this system will separate everything". It may work for may separation problems but not for all of them, or it will not be clever for certain applications. In addition, you need to know the pitfalls of peak resolution and integration problems. It is simple, not only in chromatography but in all fields of analytical chemistry, to generate numbers. But the numbers must be accurate!

All photos from Swiss expedition team and guides.