Joachim Kohn (1912-1987) and the Origin of Cellulose Acetate Electrophoresis (History‪)‬

World War II in Europe began toward the end of what W.H. Auden called "a low dishonest decade" (1). The War started on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland from the west, and 2 weeks later Russia attacked Poland from the east. Faced with 10 000 civilian causalities, the government in Warsaw surrendered on September 27, 1939 (2 ). More than 200 000 Polish soldiers along with 14 500 officers were taken prisoner by the Russians. The officers were shipped back to prisoner-of-war camps inside Russia. Eight months later, all communication from these prisoners abruptly ended. The fate of most of them is unknown to this day (3). Years later, the bodies of 4500 of these officers were discovered in mass graves near one of the camps in the Katyn Forest outside the Russian city of Smolensk. Many had their hands tied behind their backs; all had a single bullet hole in the back of their head (4). Of the 14 500 Polish officers deported to Russia, fewer than 450 are known to have survived. One of them was a 28-year-old army doctor named Joachim Kohn (5, 6). In 1941, Kohn made his way back to the Allies and joined the British Eighth Army. He served in a field ambulance company until 1947 and received 2 distinguished-service medals (7). In 1950, he took a position in the pathology service at Queen Mary's Hospital in Roehampton, London. Over the next 37 years until his death in 1987, he published more than 50 papers in clinical laboratory medicine. This short review of his work focuses on his discovery and development of cellulose acetate (CA)1 electrophoresis.