MEMOIR

We present here a Memoir of Colin Allen Wraight (19452014), a central figure in photosynthetic electron transfer research, particularly in photosynthetic bacteria, who died of leukemia, in Urbana, Illinois, on July 10, 2014. Born in London, England, on November 27, 1945, he had only recently retired from his position as a Professor in Biochemistry, Biophysics & Quantitative Biology, and Plant Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Wraight was known especially for his pioneering studies on electron and proton transfer in the photochemical reaction center, and for his careful quantitation of the remarkable quantum efficiency of this device in photosynthetic bacteria. A detailed Tribute is being published simultaneously in Photosynthesis Research, another Springer journal (Govindjee et al. 2015); this Memoir is based on the first part of that Tribute. Colin Wraight completed both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Bristol (19641971), th