Editorial

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We, the Editors and the Editorial Board Members of Acta Chromatographica, take an immense honour and great pleasure in conveying our best wishes to Professor Mieczysław (Mietek) Sajewicz, Co-Editor-in-Chief of our journal on the occasion of his 70th birthday.His contribution to establishing an international chromatography journal just in the Institute of Chemistry, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland, at a difficult moment soon after the 1989 political setup transformation in our country is hardly possible to overestimate.It was only Mietek's passion for and his firm dedication to the separation sciences in combination with his enormous entrepreneurial skills that helped him put such a seemingly odd idea into a decently functioning practice, which resulted in the first volume of the journal released in 1992, and in all volumes which have followed thereafter, over the past almost thirty years.If today we tried to remind the adventures of all kinds at an initial stage of establishing our journal, it would sound too comical or too surrealistic to be cited, and yet an only person able to cope with multiple obstacles of that chaotic period of time has inevitably and always been Mietek.Although right from the beginning Acta Chromatographica was spurred by an ambition to become an international communication platform in the field of separation sciences, its initial 'supply network' embraced mostly the research laboratories of Polish academia.However, in the span of almost thirty years that followed, our journal has been gradually yet consequently rising, always under Mietek's watchful supervision, to eventually gather contributors and readers literally from around the globe.Mietek's obsession with separation sciences materialized in the form of yet another and also very precious contribution to the chromatographic community, and namely as a series of annual chromatography symposia held in a charming mountain resort of Szczyrk in South Poland, organized by the Institute of Chemistry, University of Silesia.Once again, Mietek's vision and entrepreneurial spirit have proved pivotal for the success of this initiative, which commenced in the 'prehistoric' year 1976 andspanning epochs and generationshas been uninterruptedly continued until now.Over the years, these symposia have attracted many participants from home and abroad, and in many chromatography centres across Europe they are known as the 'eternal' Szczyrk meetings.For these two initiatives, which have provided a convenient space for the development of separation sciences, Mietek deserves our unconditional and very loud thank you.Professor Mieczysław Sajewicz was born on March 23rd, 1951 in Sosnowiec, Poland.He studied chemistry at the University of Silesia in Katowice, from which he obtained his MSc (1978) and PhD (1989) degrees in analytical chemistry, with both theses focusing on applications of gas chromatography to studying factors governing separation quality (e.g., isomerism of analytes, polarity of stationary phases, and working parameters of the gas