The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1988

Highlights in photosynthesis research
1771	Joseph Priestley, England, discovers that plants can "purify" air that has been "burned out" by a candle.
1779	Jan Ingenhousz, The Netherlands, demonstrates that the plant in Priestley's experiment is dependent on light and its green parts.
1782-1804	Several researchers show that carbon dioxide and water are stored as organic matter by plants.
1845	Robert Mayer, Germany, points out that plants store solar energy in organic matter.
ca 1915	Richard Willstätter, Germany, (Nobel Prize 1915) suggests that chlorophyll plays an active role in plants.
ca 1930	Cornelis van Niel, USA, proposes that photosynthesis is based on oxidation-reduction reactions and that the primary reaction is a photolysis of water followed by oxygen evolution.
1932	Robert Emerson and William Arnold, USA, conclude that several hundred chlorophyll molecules cooperate in photosynthesis.
1939	Robert Hill, England, demonstrates that photolysis of water and carbon dioxide fixation are separate processes.
1940	Hans Fischer, Germany, solves the chemical structure of chlorophyll. (Nobel Prize 1930 for his investigations of hemes and chlorophyll.)
1954	Melvin Calvin, USA, (Nobel Prize 1961) and coworkers unravel the reactions of carbon dioxide fixation.
1954	Daniel Arnon, USA, discovers light-dependent synthesis of ATP (photophosphorylation).
1960-1961	Robert Hill and Fay Bendall, England, and independently Louis Duysens, The Netherlands, show how two separate photosystems cooperate in plants.
1968	William Parson, USA, confirms Duysens' hypothesis (1956) that chlorophyll is oxidized in the primary reaction of photosynthesis.
1984	Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel, The Federal Republic of Germany, solve the structure of a photosynthetic reaction center from a bacterium.

Contents:
Introduction » The first crystals of membrane proteins » The structure of photosynthetic reaction center » Photosynthesis: Chemical energy from light » A closeup of a photosynthetic primary reaction » Highlights in photosynthesis research » Perspective » Further reading »
Based on materials from the 1988 Nobel Poster for Chemistry. Credits and references for the poster »