Robert Gregg Brownlee (October 21, 1942 – February 27, 1991) was an American chemist.
Biography
Robert Brownlee was born October 21, 1942, in
South Dakota. 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 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, he sold his company to
Applied Biosystems of
Foster City, California, in 1984. (Applied later merged with
Perkin-Elmer).
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) of Redwood City, California.
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