A Tribute to Renad Z. Sagdeev on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday

Renad Sagdeev stands in a tradition of great Russian scientists in magnetic resonance and the chemistry of free radicals. He was a student of Yuri Molin, who himself had done his PhD with V.V. Voevodsky, one of the early leaders of the Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion (ICK&C) in Novosibirsk. Voevodsky, in turn, came from the school of the famous scientist and Nobel laureate N.N. Semenov. Shortly after the discovery of chemically induced dynamic nuclear polarization (CIDNP) [1, 2] and its explanation in terms of the radical pair mechanism (RPM) [3, 4], Sagdeev and Molin started to explore several consequences of the RPM such as the effect of magnetic isotopes and magnetic fields on free radical reactions [5, 6]. A particularly interesting development was the stimulated nuclear polarization (SNP) experiment [7]. This experiment involves microwave irradiation of transient radical pairs in an auxiliary magnet outside the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer and allows the detection of the electron spin resonance spectrum of these short-lived species via the modulation of their CIDNP effects. Altogether, these novel results were crucial in establishing the field of Spin Chemistry as it is nowadays called and put the Novosibirsk group firmly on the map. They earned Renad Sagdeev the Lenin Prize in 1986 (together with Molin, Salikhov, Buchachenko, and Frankevich) and in 1994 the State Prize in Science and Engineering of the Russian Federation. My own interactions with Renad and the Novosibirsk group started in the late 1970s and led to frequent exchanges in the 1970s and 1980s. My visits to Akademgorodok, the lovely science town near Novosibirsk, were extremely gratifying, both scientifically and socially. I remember vividly the stimulating intellectual atmosphere at ICK&C but also the social activities such as frequent barbecues and other outings. Kev Salikhov’s teachings on fishing in the Ob lake and