La vie est donc un feu pour la calorimetrie: half a century of calorimetry - Ingemar Wadso at 70

Professor Ingemar Wadso from the Division of Thermochemistry of the Chemical Center at the historical University of Lund in Sweden is the most important calorimetrist of the second half of the 20th century. In the way that Professor Edouard Calvet made Marseille a Mecca for calorimetrists in the middle of the last century, so Ingemar Wadso did the same for Lund in its last part. In more than 200 publications encompassing nearly all fields of natural sciences - from simple chemical reactions to complex animal tissues and organelles - he promoted thermoanalytical investigations and their rigorous interpretation while contributing to quantitative as well as to analytical calorimetry. With about 35% of his papers in medicine and 25% in chemistry, the accents are clearly set. But it is the 17% of his publications concerning instrumental development and sophistication that made the name of I. Wadso best known. His ampoule, batch, perfusion, titration and flow, heat conduction, microcalorimeters manufactured in Sweden by LKB Produkter AB and then by Thermometric AB, the company he founded with Jaak Suurkuusk, are found all over the world and established his most eminent contribution to this field of science. The present paper on the occasion of Ingemar Wadso's 70th anniversary sheds light on the uniquely important biological sector of his scientific output and indicates our deep acknowledgment of the multitude of stimuli the calorimetric family received from him in the last 40 years. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.