It is well documented that some hydrazines are quite sensitive to oxidation and may serve as the electron donor for the reduction of oxygen, whereas hydrazides are not believed to react directly with oxygen. Data presented in this paper show that both hydrazides and hydrazines share an N-N moiety, which is assumed to react with atmospheric oxygen and produce oxygen radicals, at various degrees of efficiency. Since spectrometric measurements of hydrazide just after solubilization showed that the molecular mass remains constant in the absence of oxygen, we can conclude that hydrazides do not react with the oxygen through a slow spontaneous hydrolytic release of hydrazine. However, hydrazine is more reactive than hydrazide, which requires hours rather than minutes to produce measurable quantities of radical species. Differences were also apparent for various substituted derivatives. The reaction was significantly enhanced by the presence of metal ions. Data reported here demonstrate that hydrazides cause irreversible damage to the prosthetic group of proteins as well as causing degradation of the polypeptide chain into small fragments.