Professor Tetsuji Kametani, an outstanding organic chemist in the field of medicinal and heterocyclic chemistry, passed away from stomach cancer at the Sumida Central Hospital in Tokyo at 12:37 PM on October 11, 1988.
"Most scientists do their best work when they are young. Professor Kametani is the exception. The more he did, the better the quality of his work became. His latest synthetic studies using his principle of 'Retro Mass Spectral Analysis' have been particularly brilliant and fruitful. His latest synthetic work on thienamycin is in the same category." So spoke Sir Derek Barton of Professor Kametani in the preface of the special commemorative issue of HET-EROCYCLES, published in Dr. Kametani's honor.
Dr. Kametani was born in Tokyo on August 1, 1917, and graduated from the Pharmaceutical Institute, Medical Faculty, Tokyo Imperial University (now Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tokyo) in 1943, where he then started to work in the field of organic synthesis of heterocyclic compounds (including natural products) under the guidance of Professor Shigehiko Sugasawa. In 1945, after returning from military service during the war, he started his studies afresh at the Tokyo College of Pharmacy, where he synthesized many heterocyclic compounds of the isoquinoline ring system. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1951, and then moved to Osaka University. In 1959, when the Pharmaceutical Institute was newly founded in Tohoku University, he went to Sendai, 350 km northeast of Tokyo, was elected to one of its chairs as a Professor of Tohoku University, and began his brilliant career as both a teacher and researcher of excellence. During the nearly thirty years since then, he had published in a variety of journals, his work being, for the most part, concerned with synthesis in a wide area of organic chemistry, including alkaloids, terpenes, steroids and antibiotics. As