Interpersonal comparisons are seldom far from view, whether pursued on Facebook by teenagers, employees climbing the corporate ladder, or magazines profiling some “Top 100” or other, as this publication did last month. Indeed, scientists may represent a prime example. A former boss of mine was a physicist and insisted that physics was the preeminent science. After all, once you really mastered physics, you should be able to understand all the other sciences… or so he said. So, physicists were on top, presumably followed by members of other “hard” sciences, such as chemistry and geology, then the biological sciences, and finally social sciences at the bottom: a well-defined pecking order.

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About the Author

Lloyd Snyder

Lloyd Snyder has received national and international recognition for his wide-ranging contributions to chromatography, especially HPLC. He has twice been recognized by the American Chemical Society and received The Lifetime Achievement in Chromatography Award from LCGC magazine in 2012. “I first encountered gas chromatography in 1955, then switched to liquid chromatography in 1957, and HPLC, the premier technique for chemical analysis, in 1966,” he recalls. Snyder, who recently retired after a research career that spanned 60 years, spent his entire career in industry; the first half at four different companies, and the second at LC Resources, which he co-founded in 1984. During that time he authored or co-authored over 300 publications and nine books.