Results of this third Feldafing Meeting can be considered as the harvest of novel techniques in spectroscopy, biochemistry and molecular biology to the bacterial photosynthetic reaction center. New information pertains to the crystallographic and electronic structure as well as to the dynamics of primary events and the role of the protein. The answer to one long-standing problem, the mechanism of primary charge separation, converges towards a sequential scheme, supported by femtosecond spectroscopy on reaction centers with selectively modified energetics.