A personal account of some dinitrogen and organometallic chemistry research at the University of Sussex

This article reviews the development of dinitrogen chemistry and some associated organometallic chemistry at the University of Sussex with which the author was directly involved. The establishment of the basic heavy-element halide phosphine chemistry laid the ground for the discovery of dinitrogen complexes of rhenium, osmium, molybdenum and tungsten. From there, some of the first well-defined reactions of coordinated dinitrogen (especially protonation and alkylation) were discovered and the essential mechanisms of such reactions were established. This allowed the development of models for the action of nitrogenases that are still probably the best available. Later work has produced similar models in iron chemistry and a range of organometallic chemistry has been uncovered in the effort to discover parallels between the basic organometallic chemistry of substances such as metal carbonyls, dinitrogen complexes and hydrides in their interactions with acetylenes and cyclpropene.