Marvellous mimicry

Bioinorganic chemistry is an area that seems both delightfully old-fashioned and thrillingly modern. The hunt for metals in different oxidation states – and the struggle to control them – is familiar to generations of inorganic chemists. Nature has good reason for using metals that can flip between different levels of oxidation at the drop of a hat – without metals to store and release electrons, it’s hard to see how life could exist in any kind of complex state.