Hi! I am Luke Chadwick. I’ve always been in awe of the natural world. I studied chemistry in college and went on to study pharmacognosy in graduate school. My belief that humans have yet to discover a vast majority of nature’s secrets is continuously reinforced as my understanding of the natural world gets deeper and deeper. I see my own role in the whole thing as a promoter of good natural products science, in the broadest sense of the term, but also in the specific sense that I want to do everything I can to unearth the vast amounts of life-saving knowledge that will be discovered through careful study of the natural world. The sense of urgency I feel continues to grow as habitats are lost and species become extinct. Countless species have become extinct since I was born. Even if it was just one species, its truly a tragedy that neither my nor future generations will ever get a chance to discover its secrets to survival. It is perhaps even more tragic when considering the amazing development of analytical technology and the growing ease at which such secrets can be uncovered.

Early on in my adult life, during my senior year of high-school, I developed a belief that 1) “wild places” have immense value beyond what most realtors could imagine, and 2) the only way to really ensure that such places are protected are with solid economic incentives. As an undergraduate, I wanted to take what I now regard as a “fast-track” approach. I wanted to “help” people with great knowledge of traditional healing techniques, particularly medicinal plants, to exploit their knowledge, to turn nature into cash in a “sustainable” way. I don’t have any particular general moral issue with commercialization of traditional knowledge - provided the original owners of the wisdom as well as their communities are well compensated. However, as a chemist, I realized early on in graduate school that the most significant barriers to such commercialization strategies are more in legal and political realms than scientific or economic. As I was gathering that perspective, I was also coming to the understanding that, even if there were no legal or political barriers to carrying out serious and comprehensive pharmacological research on traditional food and medicines, there were certain scientific and technological barriers, and that I could make an impact in breaking them down.

My CV and a fairly recent list of publication can be found here: http://wrightwoodtech.com/lucas.html

In graduate school I discovered countercurrent chromatography with the help of my then-advisor, Doug Kinghorn (now at the Ohio State U.). In the early stages I also received key technical [and moral!] support from Nick Oberlies (then and now at Research Triangle Institute). While investigating goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) and unha de gato (Cat’s Claw, Uncaria tomentosa), in order to purify the individual components for biological study I ran numerous silica gel columns, as was and still is the norm in most natural products groups. After each silica column, I ended up with less material than I had started with. That is, what I applied to the separation column was greater/more/different than what I could get by recombining all of the separated fractions. At first I saw this as one of the “uncertainty principles” of natural products research: to look at something in detail, you have to change it (i.e. it was impossible to break down complex natural products into component parts and still retain its original identity. So Dr. Kinghorn said to me, [something like] “why don’t you try using that CCC then, the stationary phase is liquid so you shouldn’t lose any material.” [I can't remember the exact words, but they turned out to have a profound impact on my career]. There was an “Ito Apparatus”, AKA the Coil Planet Centrifuge from P.C., Incorportated in Potomac MD, that had been sitting in the corner of my lab since I had been there. I wiped the dust off (as far as I can tell, it hadn’t been used for at least 4 years at the time), and was promptly amazed at the ability of this “machine” to retain one liquid while I pumped another liquid through, and most importantly, to separate mixtures and allow 100% recovery of the starting material. I proceeded to spend nearly a year assembling peripherals (pumps, detectors, data recorder, PC, injection system) and get to my first truly successful, fully optimized separation on a CCC. Soon after that work was published (2001 JLCRT goldenseal paper), Dr. Guido Pauli joined our department as an assistant professor, and brought with him an amazing arsenal of tricks from the old-world, as well as a “modern” CCC instrument, namely, the self-balancing Pharma-Tech CCC-1000. I proceeded to work closely with Guido and the CCC-1000 for the remainder of my dissertation work on hops (Humulus lupulus).

The more I used, learned, and read about CCC, the more I came to believe this technique is just too good to be a secret. Anyone and EVERYone who is researching the pharmacology of natural products SHOULD BE using this as a primary, fundamental tool. I became obsessed to the point that Dr. Kinghorn told me, “you can’t make a career out of one technique”. I do respectfully intend to prove him wrong. Don’t get me wrong: I am a big fan and heavy user of adsorption-based separation techniques such as HPLC, am quite proficient with an NMR and the basic spectroscopic and chromatographic techniques. The fact remains, CCC is the single most underutilized chemical purification technique, and I am banking my career on the belief that I can get the word out in time.

As a hypothetical example, suppose you were an entomologist interested in why a particular species of beetle exhibits a particular behavior, and you believed that there was a particular chemical or group of chemicals that can elicit said behavior. As an entomologist, you would probably not be proficient with the most “advanced” chemical separation techniques. You have probably never heard of countercurrent chromatography. You would probably do what 99% of people in this situation do, make an extract, fractionate the extract using HPLC or some related adsorbent-based separation technique, then test the fractions for behavior-inducing activity. Given a choice of using a techniqe that promises 100% recovery (losing nothing) and a techniqe that can NEVER make such a promise (losing something), you choose the latter simply because that’s been the standard technique for decades and because its the most likely to be readily available. This brings me to the reason for starting this blog: I want everyone who makes this choice to do so consciously, and I hope that eventually with enough postings the 100th monkey will stumble across this blog and understand that she has a choice, to get the work done right the first time, and that lengthy, expensive investigations into natural products will not have to be repeated because what went in (to the separation column) was not the same as what came out. If you are a natural products researcher, in the most general sense, and if chemical separation is something that would help your research, please contact me or one of my colleagues at Cherry Instruments. Initial consultation and possibly even a feasibility study can be had for free! To summarize, if you don’t know what CCC can do for you, call Cherry Instruments!