figure a

Silvia E. (Elsa) Braslavsky, Professor Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, turned 80 on April 5, 2022. It seems difficult for those of us who picture Silvia with all her activity, motivation, and running projects, to realize that she is so active at the age of 80. However, working up to a high age seems to be in her family’s genes, as taking the example of the remarkable work of her mother who, similarly, was actively fighting for the rights of the underprivileged even into her 90s.

Considering Silvia’s many fundamental and pioneering contributions to various facets of natural and life science research, it is both mandatory and an honour to celebrate her birthday. Even a cursory examination of the numerous important details of her life (wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvia_Braslavsky) shows that such a summary is a formidable task, and indeed the many such celebrations held for her previously confirm this. We present a simple editorial to introduce a series of publications that were contributed to Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences to honour Silvia Braslavsky’s life and work.

A few words regarding her diverse and rarely easy life are appropriate. Silvia was born to Berta Perelstein de Braslavsky, a pioneer of social institutions in Argentina and a world-renowned social scientist, and Làzaro Braslavsky, a biochemist, on April 5, 1942, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She studied chemistry at the University of Buenos Aires, but this early scientific education fell in a period of political turmoil in a country that after many violent conflicts and resistance movements remained for long, dark years under the fist of a military junta. In fact, her protest against injustice and the military oppression guided her future life. The occupation of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University by Professors and students, including Silvia, as a protest activity had to be given up in the “night of the long batons” in July 1966. Silvia then had to escape the country stealthily, arriving at Chile, where—under the supervision of the renowned photochemist Eduardo Lissi—she completed her Ph.D., graduating in absentia in 1969 from the University of Buenos Aires (“The Mechanism of Gas Phase Photolysis of Isopropyl Iodide”). As for many scientists in similar situations, her life then turned into an odyssey: Silvia worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Pennsylvania State University alternating with teaching and research sojourns at the newly founded “Universidad Nacional de Rio Cuarto” in Córdoba, Argentina. Ongoing restrictions and threats in Argentina caused her to return to Penn State, along with a short research period at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. In 1976, Silvia accepted an invitation to join the research group of Kurt Schaffner, who had just been appointed as a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Radiation Chemistry at Mülheim/Ruhr. She stayed at this MPI until her formal retirement (that did not stop her scientific activities).

At all her work locations, Silvia took care of her two daughters, Paula and Carolina. This small family set up home and arranged their lives in Germany in 1976, now living in various German cities with four grandchildren. Since then, Silvia’s world became more predictable, she “only” commutes between Buenos Aires and Mülheim. Over the years, the Institute has changed from “Radiation Chemistry" to the MPI for “Bio-Inorganic Chemistry” and now it has become MPI for “Chemical Energy Conversion”. Despite these changes, Silvia was always given freedom to develop and establish her own work, as Kurt Schaffner gave free hand to two of his group leaders, Alfred Holzwarth, famous for photosynthesis research and ultrafast spectroscopy, and Silvia, who advanced on various biological photoreceptors, in particular bacteriorhodopsin, animal and microbial rhodopsins, and blue light-sensors. Her most precious gem, however, was phytochrome. At the time point when her research in Mülheim started, not much more could be said than that it was an important red/far-red sensing photochromic plant photoreceptor. The mechanisms regulating the absorption and conformational changes were entirely obscure. Silvia built laboratories for steady-state and time-resolved spectroscopies (fluorescence and absorption) and unveiled the processes that take place after photon absorption. Initially, these studies relied on plant-extracted material, but recombinant wild-type and variant proteins became available in the late 1990s allowing genetic alteration and making life both more easy and more complicated at the same time.

Interestingly, after her appointment to the MPI in Mülheim, Silvia Braslavsky took the chance to have a scientific sojourn at the Bell labs (Murray Hill, NJ, USA). This event triggered formation of a new research direction in Mülheim. Silvia became a pioneer in the development and performance of photo-(opto-)acoustic (PA) techniques for the study of biological photoreceptors, complementing the already expertly employed spectroscopic methods in an excellent manner. PA is not dependent on the detection of absorption changes, but instead records energy changes, indispensable for systems with strongly overlapping, short-lived species.

There is much, much more to tell of the still ongoing scientific life of Silvia Braslavsky, in which her formal emeritus status is just an unimportant footnote. We wish to highlight only two events that definitely deserve special attention:

Silvia was the first woman to receive the Research Award of the American Society for Photobiology (ASP) in 1998, and she was the first woman to receive the Ph.D. degree (h.c.) from the Ramon-Llull-University in Barcelona, Spain.

To honour the person and the work of Silvia Braslavsky, it was our pleasure to invite former colleagues and students to submit manuscripts on the occasion of her 80th birthday. Starting with this issue and over this year, PPS will publish research papers dedicated to Silvia Braslavsky.

Silvia, happy birthday and all the best for the future!