Reflections on a fifty-year career in organic photochemistry: a personal perspective

This Perspective traces the career of the author in the area of mechanistic organic photochemistry from the primitive state of this field in the late 1950s and early 1960s until its maturity as a highly sophisticated discipline at the present time. The paper focuses on early studies carried out by the author and his associates to delineate mechanisms of basic types of photochemical reactions of small organic molecules to studies in recent years involving photoinduced electron-transfer processes occurring in nanoscale artificial photosynthetic systems in ultrashort time domains. The important role that serendipitous events played in directing key career decisions and events is emphasized. The important ways that developments in instrumentation influenced the choices, possibilities, and accomplishments of performing research in photochemistry between 1960 and the present time are emphasized. Acknowledgment is given by the author to the many people who contributed directly and indirectly to the course that his career has taken over more than half a century.