The Merger of Bioenergetics and Molecular Biology

Introduction It is with a deep feeling of honour and gratitude that I stand here to deliver the 1903 Keilin Memorial 1,ecture. Although I have not had the privilege of knowing David Keilin personally, I have followed and admired his scientific accomplishments from the very beginning of my academic career. The only occasion upon which I met David Keilin was in 1949, at the First International Congress of 150chemistry in Cambridge. during a session where Chen I,u Tsou, then working in Keilin’s laboratory, reported the isolation of the haem-containing fragment of cytochrome c [ 11. Accidentally, it was at this congress that my teacher Olov Lindberg and I met E. C. Slater for the first time, discussing with him, sitting on the lawn outside the Molteno Institute, his views on the role of mitochondria in cell respiration. We had just begun in our laboratory at the Wenner-Gren Institute in Stockholm a project concerning ‘The Mechanism of Phosphorylative Energy Transfer in Mitochondria’ 121, including, of course, Keilin’s cytochromes and Slater‘s newly discovered ‘factor’ [3] as components of the respiratory chain. Four years later, in 1953, when I was ready to complete my Master’s degree. I was asked by my examiner, the late Professor John Kunnstriim, to write an overview of Keilin’s contributions to the elucidation of the mechanism of cell respiration. I turned to Olov Lindberg for help. He wrote to E. C. Slater on December 7th, 1953, asking him for advice. On December 1 lth, Slater sent to Lindberg a letter shown in Figure 1, accompanied by a 0-page summary, including a list of references to Keilin’s achievements in biochemistry. My overview, based on this summary, was accepted by Runnstrijm as part of the examination for my Master’s degree. In retrospect, I should point out that, in addition to the contents of Slater’s summary, I was greatly inspired, and in fact moved, by the way in which he expressed his admiration of Keilin as a scientific leader. This impression was strengthened Delivered at Imperial College, London on 20 December I993