A tribute to Andrew

It is already more than two years ago, on July 8, 1986, that our colleague Andrew Dravnieks passed away of a heart attack at his home in Park Forrest, Illinois. He was born in Leningrad (Petersburg) of Latvian parents on October 3, 1912. After the last war, he emigrated to America with his wife Erika and his two children Dzintar and Sarma. He received his Master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Latvia in Riga, and a Doctorate in physical chemistry from Illinois Institute of Technology. After having worked for some time with Standard Oil Company, he devoted most of his career to olfactory problems, at the ITT Research Institute of Chicago. Andy was a pioneer in several fields of olfaction. He combined an intense interest in the fundamental mechanisms of olfaction with a keen sense for the practical application of new techniques to olfaction and of olfactory knowledge to other problems. Being a chemist and an engineer he developed original techniques for collecting, concentrating and trapping odorous atmospheres and for analyzing them by using both physicochemical and olfactory methods either separately or in combination. He applied these methods to such diverse fields as the analysis of human body odor for the detection of possible illness on the one hand and industrial odor pollution on the other. Everybody knows his famous glass tube for collecting the odor of the entire human body, but he also greatly contributed—even if he was not the very first to use i t to the generalization of methods using the splitted effluents of a chromatograph and combining simultaneously obtained olfactory judgements and physico-chemical detections into weighted chromatograms or 'odorograms'. Such methods have found wide application in aroma research.