Obituary: Dr Terry Alan Berger (14th November 1946 – 5th May 2024)
It is with great sadness The Chromatographic Society learned of former Martin medal winner Terry Berger who died unexpectedly at the age of 77, several days after a surgical procedure.
Terry was born in Stillwater, Minnesota, and attended Carroll College in Wisconsin where he obtained his BSc and MSc in analytical chemistry. From there, he went to Purdue University for two years but moved to England to Imperial College to undertake his PhD work which he completed in 1976. Berger then accepted a visiting professorship in Brazil at the Universidad Federal de Pernambuco, but in 1977, he moved back to the United States and worked as a project leader for Life Systems, designing and building safety systems for spacecraft and submarines. After two years of developing electrochemical fuel cells, Berger accepted a job with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Avondale, Pennsylvania where his initial projects were focused on gas chromatography. However, not content with just working on gas chromatography projects, Berger also designed the pulsed amperometric detector for HPLC, detection concepts for capillary electrophoresis, and a novel GC-MS detection system generating several patents in the process.
Berger is often considered as the father of modern supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC). He began his first studies in SFC in 1985. Via literature and experimental work, he began to build his understanding of supercritical and subcritical fluids and their utility to separation science. At the time capillary SFC was deemed the future of the technique. However, Berger disagreed with this position and slowly won the community over to packed column chromatography which perseveres today. His early work included:
• Deconvoluting density and solvent strength effects.
• Showed that, large pressure drops did not result in serious efficiency losses .
• Introduced the use of additives and studied their effect on peak shape and retention.
• Demonstrated the first separations of broad classes of compounds and showed that packed column SFC was broadly applicable to much more polar solutes than previously thought.
Due to his interest in the field and SFC’s potential, Berger approached HP management and proposed the idea of buying out the SFC product line and intellectual property portfolio and forming his own company. In 1995, he formed Berger Instruments and invented an analytical scale SFC instrument. He also embarked on building an automated, high recovery purification platform using supercritical and subcritical fluids. His work attracted Mettler–Toledo and they acquired Berger Instruments in 2004 (and later their SFC portfolio was purchased by Waters). Berger then founded Aurora SFC which built a module to convert analytical scale HPLC’s into SFC’s. This module became the basis for the Agilent 1260 Infinity SFC.
Dr. Berger’s book “Packed Column SFC”, published in 1995 by the RSC, fundamentally changed the perception of SFC in separation science, illustrating modern SFC to be more like HPLC than GC. In 2015 he published a primer through Agilent which provide an update on his initial book. Berger has published over 110 papers, 7 book chapters and holds over 25 patents. He taught numerous courses on SFC and gave hundreds of presentations on the technique. He also won two IR&D100 awards and a NICE III environmental award from the Department of Energy. In recognition of his many contributions to the field of SFC, he was awarded the 2004 Martin Medal winner by The Chromatographic Society. In 2008, Carroll College recognized Berger with their Distinguished Alumnus Award for Professional Achievement. Berger was publishing as recently as 2023 and his work continued to provide important insight into the field of SFC. It is unlikely that any scientist will surpass his vast knowledge of the technique. We would like to thank Carroll College for the permission to use the photo of Terry where he was receiving the distinguished Alumnus Award for Professional Achievement in 2008.
Berger is survived by his wife of 51 years, Leslie, his daughter Blair and son-in-law Jasper. Our thoughts are with them at this sad time.
