Cytochrome Systems: From Discovery to Present Developments

Abstract

On March 21, at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where David Keilin was a Fellow, former students, colleagues and friends remembered his birth precisely 100 years earlier. It is appropriate, then, that in this Introductory Lecture to the Plenary Session at the first Bari Symposium exclusively devoted to cytochrome, we play homage to its discoverer. Although it is now 23 years since Keilin died, former students remain under the influence of his inspiring example and remain conscious of the great debt that they owe him. How often do we still think when confronted by a scientific problem: “how would Keilin have tackled it?” — or,when struggling to express oneself when writing up one’s work, “how would Keilin have put it?” For those of us who had the enormous good fortune to work under his guidance at the Molteno Institute in Cambridge — and I was lucky enough to do so for nine years — Keilin is our scientific father.