In response to the honor of being the subject of this symposium I offer some highlights from my career in chemical research.  I started with applications of fast reaction techniques, chemical relaxation and rapid mixing, to inorganic reaction mechanisms.  On my first sabbatical I broadened my techniques to include NMR line-broadening.  Single-step elementary reaction kinetics progressed to more complex reactions.  From the kinetics of metal complex formation I went on to metal-containing oxoanions, which connected me to the bioinorganic chemistry of vanadium and research on vanadium-accumulating sea squirts (tunicates).  This research led to new concepts in sea squirt biology and the discovery of a new chromophore, which we called tunichrome, and which was subsequently discovered in many sea squirt species.  From the kinetics of complex redox reactions I connected with the design of chemical oscillators, work that resulted in the creation of several dozen new oscillating reactions.  One day during this time I had lunch with collaborators from the US Army Natick Labs.  Conversation drifted to food safety and the arbitrariness of modeling bacterial growth curves with randomly chosen mathematical functions.  I recognized that a period in a chemical oscillation resembled a bacterial growth curve, and proposed combining several chemical reactions which, taken together, could model this and other complex biological processes.  The quasi-chemical kinetics model was born and this continuous, meaningful model of the microbial life cycle appears to be catching on.

From chemistry to quasi-chemistry: Perspectives on a research career

248th National Meeting (2014)

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