Ingold, Keith

Very little survives of C. K. Ingold s scientific files and correspondence, according to his son Keith U. Ingold, personal correspondence, letter of 16 July 1990. 

It is with great pleasure that we dedicate this review to Dr. Keith U. Ingold, a mentor and friend and leader in the field of radical kinetics, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. 

I thank Keith U. Ingold for having introduced me to this subject. When I arrived in Ottawa at the National Research Council of Canada in 1979 for three years postdoctoral work with him, very little was known on the reactivity of silyl radicals. At that time, several papers dealing with kinetics of silyl radicals were published, which allowed the reactivity of silyl radical to be translated into a quantitative base. Special thanks go to David Griller for his collaboration on the initial work on hydrogen donor abilities of silicon hydrides during the late 1980s. 

Financial support by The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged, as is the assistance and encouragement of many individuals. These include Professor John Perkins, who provided much of the text dealing with spin traps and the persistent radical effects, and Professors John Lorand, John Warkentin, Keith Ingold, and Paul Engel. 

Inhibition of peroxidation of unsaturated lipid chains in biomembranes is of particular significance and interest, because uncontrolled oxidation disrupts the protective layer around cells provided by the membranes. Furthermore, radical chain transfer reactions can also initiate damage of associated proteins, enzymes and DNA. The volume of literature is immense and expanding in the field of antioxidants. We will select certain milestones of advances where micelles and lipid bilayers, as mimics of biomembranes, provided media for quantitative studies on the activities of phenolic antioxidants. One of us, L. R. C. Barclay, was fortunate to be able to spend a sabbatical in Dr. Keith Ingold s laboratory in 1979-1980 when we carried out the first controlled initiation of peroxidation in lipid bilayers of egg lecithin and its inhibition by the natural antioxidant a-Toc . A typical example of the early results is shown in Figure 4. The oxidizability of the bilayer membrane was determined in these studies, but we were not aware that phosphatidyl cholines aggregate into reverse micelles in non-protic solvents like chlorobenzene, so this determination was not correct in solution. This was later corrected by detailed kinetic and P NMR studies, which concluded that the oxidizability of a lipid chain in a bilayer is very similar to that in homogeneous solution . ... 

We acknowledge useful discussions on this subject with Dr. Keith Ingold of the National Research Council of Canada. Any omissions or errors are ours. 

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