John Lemuel Bethune
John Lemuel “Lem” Bethune was born in Baddeck, Nova Scotia in 1926 and died on June 14, 2008 at the age of 82 in Barnstable, MA. He received a B.Sc. in chemistry from Acadia University in Nova Scotia in 1947 and took a position as a professional chemist with Canadian Breweries Research Institute. There, together with F.L. Rigby, he worked on the development of a reliable method to analyze the components in beer that contribute to its bitterness. Brewers had been trying since the late 1800’s to classify and quantify the bitter constituents of hops but without success. None of the sophisticated separation techniques now so readily available had been invented at that time and Lem and his co-workers turned to the tedious method of countercurrent distribution, which involves repetitive partitioning of solutes between two immiscible solvents (and was the forerunner of modern HPLC). In the early 1950’s they published...