Robert Gregg Brownlee (October 21, 1942 – February 27, 1991) was an American chemist.

Biography

Robert Brownlee was born October 21, 1942, in

South Dakota South Dakota (; Sioux language, Sioux: , ) is a U.S. state in the West North Central states, North Central region of the United States. It is also part of the Great Plains. South Dakota is named after the Lakota people, Lakota and Dakota peo ...

. He founded Brownlee Labs in the 1970s, in the

San Francisco Bay San Francisco Bay is a large tidal estuary in the U.S. state of California, and gives its name to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is dominated by the big cities of San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. San Francisco Bay drains water from a ...

area, a manufacturer of columns and pumps for

high-performance liquid chromatography High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), formerly referred to as high-pressure liquid chromatography, is a technique in analytical chemistry used to separate, identify, and quantify each component in a mixture. It relies on pumps to pa ...

systems. Bob Brownlee took the initiative "along with Tom Jupille, Steve Bakalyar, Nelson Cooke, Jerry Higgins and Ron Majors" to form the Bay Area Chromatography Colloquium. Bob Stevenson is quoted as saying in his ''Nine Lives of the California Separation Science Society'' that Brownlee Labs was "certainly one of the globe's leaders in HPLC column technology." In the 1980s, when Robert Brownlee was diagnosed with

AIDS-related complex AIDS-related complex (ARC) was introduced after discovery of the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) when the medical community became aware of the inherent difficulties associated with treating patients who have an advanced case of HIV which gave r ...

, he sold his company to

Applied Biosystems Applied Biosystems is one of various brands under the Life Technologies brand of Thermo Fisher Scientific corporation. The brand is focused on integrated systems for genetic analysis, which include computerized machines and the consumables used w ...

Foster City, California Foster City is a city located in San Mateo County, California. The 2020 census put the population at 33,805, an increase of more than 10% over the 2010 census figure of 30,567. Foster City is sometimes considered to be part of Silicon Valley ...

, in 1984. (Applied later merged with

Perkin-Elmer PerkinElmer, Inc., previously styled Perkin-Elmer, is an American global corporation focused in the business areas of diagnostics, life science research, food, environmental and industrial testing. Its capabilities include detection, imaging, inf ...

). Sometime later, he began a new company, which was viewed by Applied as a competitor. A lawsuit was instituted and later settled (''Brownlee v. Applied Biosystems, Inc.'', 1989-1 Trade Cas. ( CCH) ¶ 68, (N.D. Cal. 1989) 8,14). In 1990, he was interviewed for an article in The Scientist about Applied Biosystems. "If you produce the first product for these virgins cientists without such equipment you have a big value added, and you can charge a big price for your product," Brownlee says. "That's the reason Applied Biosystems did so well."''The Scientist'', June, 1990
/ref> He also formed the Robert Brownlee Foundation, a private family foundation which supports, with grants, K–12 science. In addition, the contributions of his foundation made possible a project introducing children to marine sciences, aboard the 90-foot research vessel the ''Robert G. Brownlee'', built in 1998 and run by the

Marine Science Institute (San Francisco Bay) The Marine Science Institute (MSI) is a nonprofit organization focusing on marine science research and education. MSI was founded in 1970 and currently is situated in Redwood City, California, adjacent to the Port of Redwood City. In the San Franc ...

Redwood City, California Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a ...

. He died on February 27, 1991, of

AIDS Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual m ...

Works

*''Simulated distillation of high-boiling petroleum fractions by capillary supercritical fluid chromatography and vacuum thermal gravimetric analysis'', with Herbert E. Schwartz, Mieczyslaw M. Boduszynski, and Fu Su in ''Analytical Chemistry'' (journal), May 15, 1987

Resources

Casss Times
Spring 2005

Autumn 2005 *California Death Index

June 1990
Applied Biosystems Timeline

References

External links

Robert Brownlee FoundationChromatography Forum
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brownlee, Robert 1942 births 1991 deaths AIDS-related deaths in California 20th-century American chemists