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 Chemica l Center at the historical University of Lund in Sweden is the most importa nt calorimetrist of the second half of the 20th century. In the way that Pr ofessor Edouard Calvet made Marseille a Mecca for calorimetrists in the mid dle 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 natu ral sciences - from simple chemical reactions to complex animal tissues and organelles - he promoted thermoanalytical investigations and their rigorou s interpretation while contributing to quantitative as well as to analytica l calorimetry. With about 35% of his papers in medicine and 25% in chemistr y, the accents are clearly set. But it is the 17% of his publications conce rning instrumental development and sophistication that made the name of I. Wadso best known. His ampoule, batch, perfusion, titration and flow, heat c onduction, microcalorimeters manufactured in Sweden by LKB Produkter AB and then by Thermometric AB, the company he founded with Jaak Suurkuusk, are f ound all over the world and established his most eminent contribution to th is 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 calo rimetric family received from him in the last 40 years. (C) 2000 Elsevier S cience B.V. All rights reserved.