Tribute to Professor Genady E. Zaikov on the Occasion of his 80thBirthday

Abstract

“In the first part of his life any scientist is working for his reputation, in the second part his reputation is working for him”. This is a typical sentence one can say about Professor Genady Zaikov, Chief Scientist of the N. M. Emanuel Institute of Biochemical Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. On January 7, 2014, Professor Zaikov's 79th birthday, a colleague reminded him that the numeric value 79 is the number of the element gold (Aurum) in the Mendeleev periodic table of elements. The number 80 refers to mercury (Hydrargium), also a very valuable metal, because of its active movement. This is what Professor Zaikov still does, in spite of his excellent reputation, gained over more than 50 years in science. On February 13, 1957, Genady started working at the Institute of Chemical Physics, Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He had the chance to begin his career in the laboratory of Professor Nikolai Markovich Emanuel, a well-known scientist in the field of chemical kinetics. During his first meeting, Emanuel asked him about his areas of expertise, and Genady answered: I know chemical kinetics, I am able to separate isotopes, and I also play the saxophone. Based on this, Emanuel invited him as a researcher to his laboratory, and also asked him to organize a jazz-band, which performed in the institute every weekend. On January 4, 1964, Genady defended his PhD thesis “The comparison of processes of butane oxidation in liquid and gas phases”. Based on these results, a plant was constructed to produce butane oxidation to acetic acid and metylethylketone, with a capacity of 10 thousand tons of acetic acid, at a Moscow oil-processing plant. His Doctor of Science thesis “Role of Media in the Radical Chain Reactions of Oxidation” was defended on April 16, 1968 and on May 20, 1968, he went to Canada (National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa) to work with Professor Keith Usherwood Ingold. After that he worked in the USA, the UK, Japan, and Germany for some time. In 1970, Genady became a Full Professor of Chemistry. Shortly after, his first book with the co-authors N. M. Emanuel and Z. K. Maizus was published in 1973 on the basis of the same research as his Doctor of Science thesis. This book was translated into English and published by Pergamon Press (Oxford, UK). To date, Professor Zaikov (with many co-authors) has published more than 400 monographs and volumes (about 300 in English and about 100 in Russian) and about 4,000 original articles in Russian and in English. All of them are devoted to chemical physics, chemical kinetics, biochemical kinetics, biochemical physics, polymer material science, composites and nanocomposites. One of his fields of expertise was the “degradation and stabilization of polymers”. Professor Zaikov also gained a good reputation in the area of flame retardancy of polymeric materials. During his career, he met many great scientists including Herman F. Mark, Austrian-US-American chemist, considered as one of the major founders of modern polymer physics. Professor Zaikov is still active as a professor at various Russian universities and as chief scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, gives many interesting lectures on international conferences, like the “Times of Polymers and Composites” (TOP) conference on the island of Ischia, Italy, 2014 (Figure 1), and will do this definitely also beyond his 80th birthday on January 7, 2015. For this I congratulate him very much and wish him good health for many more years in the field of polymer science.