Herbert Budzikiewicz was born on 20 February 1933 in Vienna. His youth was typical for many Austrians of his generation: when he was 10, owing to continuous allied bomb attacks on Vienna, his school was evacuated to a small village close to Vienna, but shortly afterwards most of the classrooms were converted into a military hospital, and the school was only open for three days a week. When the Russian approached closer his mother reached a small village in the Alps in an adventurous escape. After the end of the war Herbert returned to Vienna-he remembered the winter of 1945/1946 sitting in unheated class-rooms at temperatures several degrees below zero, the only food being the famous 'Erbsensuppe' (pea soup) sponsored by the allies.
The chaotic situation improved in the following years, but his father fell ill, and therefore Herbert tried to finish school as fast as possible to be able to feed his mother and sister. He changed from the secondary school to a more practical school (Fachhochschule Rosensteingasse) and became technical ingenieur for chemistry, but finished at the same time at a priivate school the secondary school. Thus, he was entitled to study chemistry at the University of Vienna. His interest in organic chemistry led him to the group of F. Wessely where he finished his thesis on the 'dienone-phenol rearrangement of quinol acetates' in November 1957. He spent another two years in Wessely's group. As so called 'promovierte wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft' ; his salary was much less than that of a street cleaner. By chance he heard that Carl Djerassi was looking for a 'post doc' to run a mass spectrometer. He applied for this position successfully. Djerassi sent Herbert at first to the few laboratories where this art was already performed, to Ryhage in Stockholm, Reed in Glasgow and Biemann at the MIT in Cambridge (USA). During these visits he got the depressing impression that mass spectrometers work only occasionally: in Stockholm Ryhage had just moved into a new building and installed a new instrument, Herbert never saw it working. Reed was installing a direct inlet system, he saw just one spectrum. He was more fortunate in Boston, where he spent a few short days, experienced a blizzard and all the circumstances connected with that phenomenon. Arriving at Stanford he was confronted with a half-installed CEC 103. The installation was finished under Herbert's critical eyes but, nevertheless, spectra could not be obtained. The ion source was changed several times, then Herbert remembered the 'last help' for instruments at that time: a Tesla generator. With that he treated all the pins, tremendous sparks illuminated his source. This was the start of Herbert's career.
I admire how he overcame this first critical phase at the beginning of his five year stay at Stanford, nearly alone with a complicated instrument, always between the state of desperation and hope.
This period in Stanford was a very busy one, he was involved with all the important papers in which, within a short time, the structures of many alkaloids were clarified by application of Biemann's shift rule; but even more importantly he was involved in the Stanford group's pioneering investigation into the mass spectrometric behaviour of all common classes of nalural products and synthetic compounds. Labelling experiments were performed to clarify mass spectrometric degradation paths; nearly every week a new paper appeared. The combined knowledge on mass spectrometry was then accumulated in a book (1964) written together with Djerassi and Williams: 'Interpretation of Mass Spectra of Organic Compounds'; followed rapidly (also 1964) by two others on 'Mass Spectra of Natural Products'. These three authors wrote then the 'bestseller' in Organic Mass Spectrometry: the enhanced edition of 'Mass Spectra of Organic Compounds' (1967), still today the leading textbook in this discipline.
His time in Stanford was also a very happy period: Herbert was fully integrated in the Stanford group, he had for the first time in his life enough