science · 07 July 1974 · 50 years ago
death
Died 7 Jul 1974 at age 68 (born 12 Jun 1906).
Lyman Creighton Craig was an American chemist who developed the counter-current distribution (CCD) method. Within five years of earning his Ph.D., he had designed and built a microdistillation apparatus (1936). Wartime research on antimarial drugs required identification of microgram amounts of an organic compound in a mixture, for which he devised a laboratory technique based on the distribution coefficient. He soon developed the CCD method for fractionation of complex mixtures with an apparatus that could simultaneously accomplish 20 quantitative extractions in a single step. A notable separation, from a difficult mixture, was the isolation and purified parathormone, the active principle of the parathyroid gland, achieved in 1960 with his colleagues. Craig also designed several other significant instruments, including his rotary evaporator, among others.
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