Fred Basolo and the (Re)naissance of American Inorganic Chemistry

It was an Australian/British chemist, Sir Ronald Nyholm, who first spoke of a “renaissance” of inorganic chemistry; but its emergence as a newly dynamic subfield, beginning in the 1950s, can be seen even more clearly in the US. While John Bailar is often credited as the “Father of American Inorganic Chemistry,” it is arguable that Fred Basolo, Bailar’s student at Illinois, has had the most lasting impact on the dramatic growth of the field in American academia. Justification for that assertion includes the remarkable representation of his academic descendants among inorganic faculty members of American universities; comments and reminiscences from the students he trained; and an examination of his seminal contributions in the form of both original research and textbooks, particularly the groundbreaking 1958 work Mechanisms of Inorganic Reactions, written with his Northwestern colleague Ralph Pearson, which played a central role in raising the intellectual stature of inorganic chemistry by bringing the study of mechanism to the forefront