Foreword: Highlights in Plant Mitochondrial Research

The late 1950s and 1960s were preoccupied with determining the seat of oxidative phosphorylation and associated metabolism within cells, and once that was more or less accepted, the next two decades were devoted to investigating the mitochondrial genome structure, the composition of the electron transport chain, the basic carbon and nitrogen metabolism associated with mitochondria, and, mainly in mammalian cells, the mechanism of ATP synthesis. This was an intensely competitive period in mitochondrial research, and conferences were often fi ery and controversial (and fun, if you liked that sort of thing).