Edward Charles Slater. 16 January 1917 — 26 March 2016

With the death of Edward Charles Slater, Bill for insiders, biochemistry loses one of the key players in the field of bioenergetics in the second half of the twentieth century. Raised in Australia and trained as a chemist, he joined the lab of David Keilin FRS in Cambridge for his PhD where he discovered a new component of the mitochondrial respiratory chain, an Fe-S protein, long known as the Slater factor. After a brief post-doc period in the lab of Severo Ochoa in New York, where Slater started studies on oxidative phosphorylation that would remain his major interest, he returned to Keilin's institute. In 1953 he formulated there his chemical hypothesis for the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation that would dominate the field until displaced by the chemi-osmotic theory of Peter Mitchell FRS. In 1955 Slater moved to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he built up one of the largest and most successful biochemistry labs in Europe. He was not only an excellent biochemist, but also an outstanding mentor and a gifted administrator who turned Biochimica et Biophysica Acta ( BBA ) into the largest and one of the most influential biochemical journals of the 1960s and 1970s and who contributed to the governance of numerous organizations, such as the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB).

David Keilin, 1887-1963

The sudden death on 27 February 1963 of David Keilin deprived the scientific world of a biologist the span of whose scientific activities is unlikely to be equalled, much less excelled, in the future. These activities extended from descriptive morphology of protists, fungi and insects to the biochemistry of respiratory enzymes and metallo-protein compounds. It is, consequently, not possible for one person to deal adequately with all aspects of his work and in this appreciation of the man and his scientific achievements the main emphasis will be on his biological work. That bearing on parasitology will be considered in some detail, whereas the later, more biochemical, work will be considered briefly as fuller accounts of it have already been given by E. F. Hartree (Biochem. J.89, 1–5), T. R. R. Mann (Biogr. Mem. Fellows R. Soc.10, 185–207) and E. C. Slater (Enzymologia, 26, 313–20). In the brief survey of his biochemical work I have made much use of summaries and reports written by Keilin himself and I have often given the essence of lines of work summed up in his own words which express his conclusions with the elegance, lucidity and brevity characteristic of his style. As I was closely associated with David Keilin and in almost daily contact with him for just on forty years, it is natural that the following account will to some extent reflect my own interests and those aspects of his personality which became manifested during long and intimate contact both in private life and collaboration in scientific and administrative work.

David Keilin, 1887-1963

David Keilin was born on 21 March 1887, in Moscow, where his parents were residing temporarily at that time. Soon afterwards however he returned with his parents to Poland where his father, a successful businessman, had his office and owned some land. He was the fourth child of a family of seven, and the youngest of three sons. School days in Warsaw Although afflicted early in his childhood by asthma, an ailment which continued to trouble him in later life, he retained very happy memories of the school days spent in Warsaw. As a delicate boy he was educated up to the age of 10 by a governess at home, and by his mother whose memory he treasured as that of a wise and kind and at the same time highly energetic woman. In 1897 he entered the Gόrski Gymnasium in Warsaw, a private Polish high-school (the state schools at that time were Russian). This establishment directed by Mr Gόrski, achieved distinction in Polish history of that period both for its high standards of education as well as on account of its patriotic spirit, which on more than one occasion brought its teaching staff and the pupils into conflict with the Tsarist government. Nothing unfortunately remains today of the records of that school which, with the rest of the city, was burned and razed to the ground by the Nazis after the Warsaw rising of 1944. In September 1904, three months after his graduation from the Gόrski Gymnasium, David Keilin left Warsaw to seek education abroad, first in Liège and later in Paris, planning eventually to become a doctor of medicine.