LAUSR

‘‘On the arid lands there will spring up industrial colonies without smoke and without smokestacks; forests of glass tubes will extend over the plants and glass buildings will rise everywhere; inside of these will take place the photochemical processes that hitherto have been the guarded secrets of the plants, that will have been mastered by human industry which will know how to make them bear even more abundant fruit than nature, for nature is not in a hurry and mankind is. . . . . .And if our black and nervous civilization, based on coal, will be followed by a quieter civilization based on the utilization of solar energy, that will not be harmful to progress and to human happiness.’’ The above lines are the last ones of the article by Giacomo Ciamician, ‘‘The Photochemistry of the Future’’, following a lecture given by Ciamician at the Congress of Applied Chemistry in New York the same year. The wishes and hopes embedded in Ciamician’s words seem to be closer to reality nowadays. Indeed, the ‘‘guarded secrets of the plants’’, that is the basic mechanisms of photosynthesis, have been in large part determined in the past few decades. Thanks to the progress in studies of the mechanisms of photoinduced electron and energy transfer, as well as the development of methods to synthesize complex artificial systems (including supramolecular chemistry approaches), several steps have been made towards the goal of reaching one of the holy grails of science, that is the achievement of an effective light energy to chemical energy conversion (artificial photosynthesis), although more work is still to be done. The development of new instrumentation has allowed the application of new experimental techniques, which have enabled detailed investigations of natural and a Department of Chemistry, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8107, USA. E-mail: [email protected] b Department of Chemical, Biological, Pharmaceutical and Environmental Sciences, University of Messina, Piazza Pugliatti, 98166, Messina, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]