Reactions: Remembering the Unit of Nitrogen Fixation

Letters to the editor

Nitrogen fixation

I was taken back a significant period of years by the article in C&EN on nitrogen fixation as a potential answer to the massive overuse of fertilizers (July 31, 2023, page 24). The underlying reasons go back centuries in Europe and other parts of the world, where the system of leaving a field fallow every 3 years except for growing clover was used. Nowadays the reasons are obvious, as the nodules on clover were recognized as sources of N₂ fixation many years earlier by microbiologists.

In the 1963–64 time frame, the UK’s Agricultural Research Council funded the first university-based multidisciplinary group in the world to study nitrogen fixation. The Unit of Nitrogen Fixation under the direction of professors Joseph Chatt and John Postgate started at the University of London (Royal Veterinary College and Queen Mary College) and then moved to the new University of Sussex (December 1964–January 1965). I joined the Queen Mary College laboratory as a research technician under Chatt together with Rosemary Paske (graduate student), and then we all moved to Sussex, expanding with more inorganic chemists plus microbiologists. The original grad students (including me, later an external student of Postgate’s) received our DPhil degrees in the early summer of 1968 (Howard Dalton, Brian Heaton, Mick Mingos, and Rosemary Paske).

Subsequently, the unit moved to the John Innes Institute at the University of East Anglia. In 2011, I was delivering a seminar at the chemistry department at East Anglia and was asked about the unit. Apparently by then I was one of the few known members of it.

The multidisciplinary relationships in the unit were probably the reason why very significant basic results related to nitrogen fixation were reported then and over the following years. These included studies in the aerobic nitrogen-fixing bacterium Azotobacter vinelandii by the late Dalton and inorganic chemistry studies related to N₂ fixation by Mingos, Heaton, and Paske. My contribution covered electron transport in anaerobic sulfate-reducing nitrogen-fixing marine bacteria.

Although Dalton, Mingos, and I went over on the same plane to postdoc in the US in the late summer of 1968, I was the only one who stayed in the US.

David J. Newman
Wayne, Pennsylvania