Forty-Five Years of Chemical Discovery Including a Golden Quarter-Century

Inorganic chemistry became a passion for me as a graduate student in the 1950s. It was exciting to be part of the renaissance of the discipline, and I am pleased to have contributed to its strength. Physical concepts applied to the understanding of the properties of transition metal compounds guided our work initially. In the 1970s, probably as a direct result of the world abandoning the gold standard, the chemistry of gold was awakened after a long sleep. Much of the chemistry covered in this review of our work relates to novel compounds of gold and the properties they display which have been uncovered during the last 25 years of the 20th century. Stable metal-metal bonded Au(II) and organometallic Au(III) compounds, bi- and trimetallic oxidative addition, phosphorescent species with microsecond lifetimes, gold chains resulting from aurophilic bonding stronger than H-bonding, and recently, gold binding to organic pi acids have intrigued my group and other gold chemists during this period.