Michael L. Gross is Professor of Chemistry, Medicine, and Immunology, at Washington University in St. Louis. He was formerly Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 1968–1994. He is recognized for his contributions to the field of mass spectrometry and ion chemistry. He is credited with the discovery of distonic ions, chemical species containing a radical and an ionic site on different atoms of the same molecule.
Career
Working with colleagues at the Environmental Protection Agency, he validated the part-per-trillion analysis of 2378-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin in biological tissues, perhaps the first validation of an ultra-trace analytical chemistry method. With this method, he and his coworkers found this highly toxic compound in the tissue of veterans of the Vietnam War, a controversial observation that was later validated by scientists at the Center for Disease Control. In 1978, he became Director of a National Science Foundation Center for Mass Spectrometry at Nebraska. Under the aegis of the NSF, he commissioned the first commercial triple sector tandem mass spectrometer. With this instrumentation, his coworkers and he sequenced the first unknown peptide using soft ionization and tandem mass spectrometry. They also discovered a new class of fragmentation of gas-phase ions later termed "charge-remote fragmentation." and applied it to a wide variety of compounds including fatty acids, lipids, surfactants, steroids, and peptides. An expanded four-sector version was employed to insert noble gas atoms in C-60 and other fullerenes and a second noble gas atom in synthetic fullerenes already containing a noble gas atom. In the late 1970s, Charles Wilkins and Gross built the second Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer and were the first to use it for analytical applications. Notable were the demonstrations of GC/MS, laser desorption, gas pulsing, multiphoton ionization, and the development of calibration law for accurate mass measurement. More recently, Don Rempel and he described an electrically compensated FTICR trap to improve mass resolving power.
Gross has authored and coauthored over 500 papers and book chapters. He was recognized as 50 Most Cited Chemists Institute for Scientific Information, 1984-1991. He was recognized in 2010 as the 356th most cited of living chemists.
Books
Ed., High Performance Mass Spectrometry: Chemical Applications, American Chemical Society Symposium Series, 70, 1978, 358 pp.
Ed., Mass Spectrometry in the Biological Sciences: A Tutorial, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1992, 451 pp.
Joint Ed., Biological Mass Spectrometry Present and Future, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chichester, 653 pp.
