Opening Remarks

Abstract

I’ve been around a long time doing coordination chemistry, as you people know, and for about, twenty years we did synthetic oxygen carrier type work. This was started in 1964 by a graduate student by the the name of A1 Crumbliss who is now a professor at Duke University. Crumbliss and I decided we would study solution chemistry of some of the cobalt chelates that Martell and Calvin and others had looked at primarily in solid-state gas-phase interactions. Fortunately A1 chose a system that gave for the first time monomeric dioxygen complexes of a series of cobalt compounds. We were never able to get a good suitable single crystal to give Jim Ibers to do the X-ray structure, but we were able to wave our hands and speculate about the structure on the basis of IR and of EPR spectra with the help of Brian Hoffman. We suggested that the dioxygen cobalt chelates have an end-on bent structure which later Ward Robinson showed by X-ray structure to be correct. As you know several of these structures have been found not only for cobalt, but also for iron.