Norman Sutin, Founding Editor of Comments on Inorganic Chemistry: A Remembrance and Tribute

Norman Sutin, a distinguished inorganic chemist who studied electron and charge-transfer reactions, died on January 31, 2022, at the age of 93. He was the founding editor of Comments on Inorganic Chemistry. Sutin pioneered the use of transition-metal complexes to study ground and excited-state reactions and to identify outer-sphere electron transfer reactions from other types of reactions. He was a master at using experiments to test theoretical descriptions of electron-transfer reactions, Figure 1. Sutin was born in Ceres, South Africa, on September 16, 1928. He was the third of three children and grew up in Paarl, an area northeast of Cape Town. In his late teens, he became interested in mysticism and meditation. During one meditation, he focused on how a candle burns. He believed this experience sparked his interest in how the exchange of different forms of energy can control chemical reactions. His initial work considered how energy released by radioactive decay controlled subsequent chemical reactions. Later, he studied how the thermal energy of the reactants controls rates of electron transfer between them, and then how absorption of light can provide the energy to drive a chemical reaction. Sutin received a bachelor’s degree with distinctions in Physics and Chemistry from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1948. He continued at UCT and received a master’s degree. He earned his doctorate in 1953 from Trinity College, Cambridge, in Alfred G. Maddock’s Radiochemistry group. He became friends with Dr. Garman Harbottle, a visiting scientist from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), US. After a postdoc at Durham University, he moved to the United States and joined BNL as a Research Associate. He imagined Brookhaven as a bucolic area with green fields and