ELECTRON‐NUCLEAR AND ELECTRON‐ELECTRON SPIN INTERACTIONS IN THE STUDY OF ENZYME STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION*

The past decades have witnessed an astounding development in the area generally referred to as biological chemistry, a development in volume and in depth. An increasing number of colleagues trained in the more basic physical sciences feel the challenge to apply concepts and theory which have proven their value in the long established areas of chemistry to problems of the new biological branch. However, there have been and still are serious obstacles to communication across boundaries of traditionally separated disciplines. The most serious are probably the difference in language and the very characteristics of the objects of investigation-biological substances. They are often not easily available, hard to reproduce, poorly defined and so bulky that any intrinsic specific property that one may want to investigate is diluted out by the bulk of the material with which it is by necessity associated. We see, therefore, at least one of the missions of the biochemists represented herein in presenting examples to our theoretically oriented colleagues, where macromolecular substances have been brought to a state of definition so that theory, albeit in simple form, has led to unique and decisive answers.