DAVID KEILIN’S RESPIRATORY CHAIN CONCEPT AND ITS CHEMIOSMOTIC CONSEQUENCES

It was obviously my hope that the chemiosmotic rationale of vectorial metabolism and biological energy transfer might one day come to be generally accepted, and I have done my best to argue in favour of that state of affairs for more than twenty years. But, it would have been much too presumptuous to have expected it to happen. Of course, I might have been wrong, and in any case, was it not the great Max Planck (1928, 1933) who remarked that a new scientific idea does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but rather because its opponents eventually die? The fact that what began as the chemiosmotic hypothesis has now been acclaimed as the chemiosmotic theory- at the physiological level, even if not at the bio-chemical level- has therefore aroused in me emotions of astonishment and delight in full and equal measure, which are all the more heartfelt because those who were formerly my most capable opponents are still in the prime of their scientific lives. I shall presently explain the difference between the physiological an