The study of photosynthesis --the ability of plants, algae, and bacteria to translate sunlight into energy to build various chemical compounds--has long intrigued scientists, yet it is only since the 1950s that this process has begun to be understood in any detail. The analytic work of Robert Huber has played a significant role in the development of this understanding, and his most important achievement was matching the structure of a photosynthesizing protein complex to its function. Huber's work in X-ray diffraction enabled him and a co-worker to map the atomic structure of a bacterial photosynthetic reaction center --the basic unit or heart of the photosynthetic process. Such a description has helped advance not only photosynthesis research, but also various medical investigations. For his work in "unraveling the full details of how [such a] protein is built up, revealing the structure of the molecule atom by atom," the Nobel...