Keilin

[Guest guest]

Keilin Keilin was a brilliant worker in the field of cytochromes and his work clearly merited the Nobel Prize.In the event his nomination was overlooked in favour of just the home grown Swedish nominee.Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prize, his work is such that one of his students who did get the Nobel Prize clearly showed in his Nobel lecture the worth of Keilin and his research on cytochromes.http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1978/mitchell-lecture.pdf

The earlier tribute to Keilin came in a 1973 article already mentioned.There was a later tribute to him in 2003http://www.jbc.org/content/278/19/16455.full.pdf+html

He died in the early sixties but he did write a book published after his deathThe History of Cell Respiration and Cytochrome by Keilin.Today, although thousands of cytochromes are known and his work contrasts to the complex pathways of today almost only understood by the authors themselves, it is a tribute from the Nobel Prize winner that his simple chemistry is CORRECT and still holds today.A Japanese claim to be the discoverer of Cytochrome 450 (found in our liver) comes from the place on the light spectrum where the cytochrome peak appears but is simply a copy of the microscopic work of Keilin who used the same idea of adapting a spectroscope to his microscope to obtain not one peak but four peaks for his cytochrome discovery decades earlier.Missing his deserved Nobel Prize but Keilin is credited with naming the pigment which today bears the name CYTOCHROME.The pigments were known the field of science before the birth even of Keilin but to him goes the glory of explaing first the action in our body and of course in the MITOCHONDRIA.Coming full circle we can see the ADVERSE effect of mercury on cytochromes in a 1979 - 1980 paper by Mann and Auerhttp://www.jbc.org/content/255/2/454.long

And Auer published another later paper in 1984http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bi00299a015

This show the complex with mercury is STABLE and hence VERY TOXIC for us.It shows the toxicity is reached quickly and then further mercury has NO further effect.In accordance with what we already know that small amounts of mercury are more deadly than larger amounts in the sense that the extra mercury just sits there as the damage has already been done and no further damage is possible. Keilin