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Theophrastus proposed that plants obtain nutrition via their roots.
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Aristotle proposed that plants need food to survive.
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Nicholas de Cusa experimented with plants, and predicted that plants derive their mass from water, and not soil.
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Jan Baptista Van Helmont conducted experiments which led him to conclude that trees consumed water, not soil.
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John Woodward declared that plants need nourishment from sources other than water. Also, he declared that soil imparts mass to plants.
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Stephen Hales declared that plants need air to live and he inferred that plants need light for photosynthetic reactions.
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Joseph Priestly discovered a gas, dubbed "dephlogisticated air" by focusing solar rays on mercuric oxide. This gas was later names "oxygen"
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Antoine Lavoisier gave oxygen gas its name and debunks the phlogiston theory.
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Jan Ingen-Housz discovered that plants emitted oxygen gas in light, thereby initializing the concept of photosynthesis.
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Jean Senebier discovered that plants absorb gaseous carbon dioxide and they simultaneously emit gaseous oxygen.
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Comparetti first discovers what are now known as chloplasts in plant tissues.
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Nicolas de Saussure conducted experiments that led him to conclude that during photosynthesis, plants absorb gaseous carbon dioxide. (de Saussure, par 5)
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Concluded that plants store solar energy and that photosynthesis is the transformation from light energy to chemical energy.
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Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann discovered the effect of varying wavelengths of light on photosynthesis, and used this information to create the action spectrum.
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Robert Emerson and William Arnold stated that photosynthesis occurs by hundreds of chloroplasts cooperating with each other.
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Melvin Calvin traced the path of carbons in photosynthesis, thereby founding the Calvin Cycle
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Rudolph A. Marcus developed the Marcus Theory, which refers to electron transfer in plants' cells.
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A consortium discovers an almost complete genome squence of the Arabidopsis thaliana.
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The U.S. Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab managed to turn sunlight into liquid form to replicate photosynthesis. This will reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that natural photosynthesis contributes to.