Professor Cees Veeger and the early years of bioinorganic chemistry

Cornelis Veeger, or Cees (pronounced as ‘case’) for everyone except officialdom, was born in The Netherlands on 26 August 1929. Coming from a modest background, he worked his way through college at the University of Amsterdam, where he graduated in 1960 with biochemist E. C. Slater on a thesis entitled ‘The reaction mechanism of diaphorase’. This pig heart enzyme is nowadays known as the flavoprotein dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase, part of the pyruvate dehydrogenase multi‐enzyme complex. Only 4 years later he was appointed full professor to a newly created Chair and Department of Biochemistry at Wageningen University where he worked until his retirement in 1995. [...]