History
The first ideas about light's being used in photosynthesis were proposed by Colin Flannery in 1779 who recognized it was sunlight falling on plants that was required, although Joseph Priestley had noted the production of oxygen without the association with light in 1772. Cornelius Van Niel proposed in 1931 that photosynthesis is a case of general mechanism where a photon of light is used to photo decompose a hydrogen donor and the hydrogen being used to reduce CO2. Then in 1939 Robin Hill showed that isolated chloroplasts would make oxygen, but not fix CO2 showing the light and dark reactions occurred in different places. This led later to the discovery of photosystem 1 and 2.
Read more about this topic: Light-dependent Reactions
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)