Читать книгу Molecular Mechanisms of Photosynthesis - Robert E. Blankenship - Страница 42

Jan Ingenhousz (1730–1799) was a Dutch physician and man of the world; he was at one‐time court physician to the Austrian empress Maria Theresa and had also visited England on several occasions (Magiels, 2010). On one of these trips in 1773, he heard a lecture by John Pringle, the President of the Royal Society, in which he presented a medal to Priestley. In his lecture, Pringle lauded Priestley's accomplishments. Ingenhousz thus became interested in the subject, but took no action until several years later when, in 1779, he rented a house in the English countryside and in the short space of three months conducted more than 500 experiments on the properties of plants and their effects on the air. During this frenzied summer, Ingenhousz discovered the essential role of light in the process of photosynthesis. By October of the same year, he had already written up his results in the form of a book entitled Experiments upon Vegetables, Discovering Their Great Power of Purifying the Common Air in Sunshine and Injuring It in the Shade and at Night. In addition to discovering the effect of sunlight, Ingenhousz discovered plant respiration, although he greatly overemphasized the effects of it, as can be seen from the title of his book. Ingenhousz was a brilliant, but not very careful, scientist and often jumped to conclusions with little evidence. Nevertheless, his contributions to the understanding of photosynthesis were extremely important, including a book published in 1796, Food of Plants and Renovation of the Soil. In this book, he summarized and presented for the first time the process of photosynthesis in terms of the new chemistry proposed by Lavoisier.