Csaba Horváth was my colleague in the Departments of Engineering and Applied Science and then Chemical Engineering, for over thirty years. In that time I saw him in the roles of husband, father, teacher, mentor, committee member, departmental chair, and scientist. I don’t believe I will be giving away any secrets by saying that he was good in all of these roles, but he was foremost an outstanding scientist because he had the ability and he put that first in his life. At the same time, I don’t mean to imply that Csaba was good at everything. Riding in a car that he was driving was always a unique experience and could be very frightening. I want to start with his humane attributes. He was a warm, caring person and a very social individual. He liked food; to cook it and to eat it. I remember on several occasions when he cooked the biggest pot of goulash I ever hope to witness and invited all of his students, research associates and faculty colleagues to try to empty the pot. English was not his first language, but he knew his way around it better than most of us who know no other language, perhaps because of his knowledge of its Latin roots. He appreciated humor, told good stories, and graced his conversation with wit. Csaba did not always think along conventional lines, could easily argue both sides of a dispute, and would often come at a problem in an unexpected way. I am sure this was part of his originality in his scientific work. He was also an optimist and sometimes held conventional wisdom in distain. To illustrate this aspect of his character, I tell an anecdote which pre-dates the current Yale administration at a time when Yale had budget deficits and proposed to fix them by an academic restructuring. Most of us interpreted the restructuring of the engineering departments as the end of engineering at Yale. There were many faculty meetings, often dominated by the faculty from the history department that was in no danger of losing its franchise. Most of us thought the sky was falling, but what was Csaba’s analysis of the situation? He took the positive view that now the very large faculties of English and History at least knew that Yale had departments of engineering because the University was considering dissolving them. This was intended, in part, as black humor. It also reflected a certain truth that ultimately resulted in a rallying of those same faculty members to our support on the grounds that the end of the twentieth century was no time to turn our back on technology or on the departments that practiced it and reached out to society. Csaba could see Yale’s faults, but he understood the institution and was dedicated to this place. Because his reputation outside of Yale was always held in greater esteem than is was here, I am sure he could have found places where he would have done superb work with greater institutional support. But Csaba loved Yale and gave no indication that he had any intention of moving. He was in many respects, of the Old Europe, appreciated a certain formality, and respected tradition, and that was a nice fit at Yale. It was his view that the heart of Yale was The Mory’s Association, which is certainly a Yale tradition, but has no formal connection to the University. Csaba Horváth will be known as the father of high-performance liquid chromatography and perhaps as the leading separation scientist of the twentieth century. Others will likely tell us more about this, but I want to emphasize that he also made important contributions to biotechnology as well as separation science. In 1972, the year he joined Yale Chemical Engineering, he published his first experimental paper on enzyme reactors with his student Barry Soloman and with another student, Jean Marc Engasser, followed up with a theoretical analysis. He continued some aspects this work for at least fifteen years ending with work with his student Steven Cramer. Overlapping this period was his close collaboration, not in publication, but in hallway conversations, with our mutual colleague John Fenn. Csaba made significant contributions, which I know John would wish to have recognized here today, to the work that ultimately resulted in the 2002 Nobel Prize awarded John. In many ways it can be said that Csaba Horváth led chemical engineering at Yale into the twenty-first century. I say this because the current directions, nationally and internationally, are toward biology and toward molecular understanding, directions that Yale was moving in a quarter of a century ago. Csaba not only espoused this as the future in his own work but helped shape a department that embraced this view. In so many ways, he was of the old school but started a new school with a vision ahead of his time. He will be greatly missed as a colleague and as a friend. |