Pittcon Heritage Award

David Schwartz, Recipient of the Pittcon Heritage Award for 2007We have traveled from the corners of the county through inclement weather. We have been awake for too many hours, have had our flights cancelled, and have had plenty of time to see Chicago while sitting in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Most of us have arrived at Pittcon 2007 wet, cold, and frustrated.

But a small blizzard whooping around Chicago couldn’t bring David Schwartz down today when he was presented with the 2007 Pittcon Heritage Award. Schwartz was beyond elated when he received the prestigious award from the Pittsburgh Conference and the Chemical Heritage Foundation in front of his friends and colleagues.

The Pittcon Heritage Award recognizes outstanding individuals who have shaped the instrumentation community, inspired achievement, promoted public understanding of the modern analytical sciences, and highlighted the roles of chemistry in the world economy. Recipients of the award are also inducted into the Pittcon Hall of Fame, which recognizes pioneers in the analytical instrumentation world.

Schwartz is chairman of Bio-Rad Laboratories. Bio-Rad Laboratories manufactures and distributes thousands of products for a wide range of technologies for the life sciences, including proteomics, real-time PCR, electrophoresis, imaging, immunoassay, and chromatography. Bio-Rad is internationally renowned among hospitals, universities, and major research institutions, as well as biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

Behind every great analytical scientist, there's a great woman, and Schwartz was quick to recognize the influence and support of his wife who co-founded Bio-Rad with Schwartz in 1952. Schwartz met his wife at the University of California, Berkley, where he earned a degree in chemistry.

A picture from the very early days of Bio-Rad showed Schwartz standing with his wife and a small group of employees in front of their first building in Berkeley, California, a quonset hut. Their plan was to market products that they thought should be available but weren't available commercially, including tobacco mosaic virus, which required extensive preparation. That idea didn't catch fire, but later efforts did. Schwartz had success in marketing various Dow resins for chromatography among other things.

Bio-Rad was built into an internationally successful company serving more than 85,000 customers in research and industry. The company employs more than 5000 people and has grown to more than $1 billion in revenues.