Profile of Richard Eisenberg.

If Richard Eisenberg hadn’t accidentally spilled the flask containing a red, corrosive liquid one day in 1963, he might not have become the accomplished inorganic chemist he is today. Back then, as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York City, he set about synthesizing an organometallic vanadium compound (1). However, to do that, he first had to make vanadium tetrachloride, a highly reactive liquid that gives off fumes of hydrochloric acid when exposed to moisture. On that day in 1963, Eisenberg had succeeded in generating a precious amount of vanadium tetrachloride when he dropped the flask, spilling its contents all over the fume hood of the laboratory. As a result of that incident, Eisenberg decided to take a break from synthesis and began using X-ray crystallography to analyze the structures of molecules made by others. Although he did not realize it at the time, this fortuitous turn of events ultimately led him down a fruitful path of research and discovery. In the decades that followed, Eisenberg— a professor of chemistry at the University of Rochester and a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)— proceeded to make significant contributions to our understanding of the structure–function relationships of inorganic and organometallic compounds. Along the way, he became interested in applying his skills and knowledge toward what he calls the greatest scientific and technological challenge of the 21st century that is not directly related to human health: developing renewable energy for sustainable development on a global scale. Projected increases in global energy needs “can be met satisfactorily by only one kind of alternative energy—the Sun,” Eisenberg wrote in a 2009 Science article (2). One approach to harvesting sunlight for renewable energy involves mimicking the ability of green plants and other photosynthetic organisms to store the energy of sunlight in chemical bonds—an approach known as artificial photosynthesis, which is based on the light-driven splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen. In his Inaugural Article, Eisenberg describes a highly active and robust artificial photosynthetic system for converting the protons in water to hydrogen gas, an attractive fuel that can be readily converted into electrical energy and produces no carbon dioxide on combustion, in contrast with all other fuels (3).