The British Biophysical Society is a

scientific society A learned society (; also learned academy, scholarly society, or academic association) is an organization that exists to promote an academic discipline, profession, or a group of related disciplines such as the arts and science. Membership may ...

that exists to encourage and disseminate developments in the application of physical and chemical concepts to biological systems. It was founded in 1960 following a report from a Working Party on Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry initiated by the Council of the then

Faraday Society The Faraday Society was a British society for the study of physical chemistry, founded in 1903 and named in honour of Michael Faraday. In 1980, it merged with several similar organisations, including the Chemical Society, the Royal Institute of Che ...

of London. The current Chair is Olwyn Byron.

History

The first full meeting of the Working Party on Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry was held on 4 February 1960. The party included D D Eley, L H Gray, A F Huxley, J C Kendrew, C F A Pantin, R D Preston, J T Randall, F J W Roughton and P M B Walker. The first meeting of the British Biophysical Society was held at King's College (London) and was organised by J T Randall. The birth of the BBS can be said to date from this inaugural meeting held on 19 and 20 December 1960. The meeting took the form of two symposia on Comparative Studies of Muscular Contraction and on the Structure of

Ribonucleic Acid Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule essential in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation and expression of genes. RNA and deoxyribonucleic acid ( DNA) are nucleic acids. Along with lipids, proteins, and carbohydra ...

, together with sessions for contributed papers. Minutes of the Steering Committee held on 8 December record that there had already been 183 applications to join the Society and 177 to attend the meeting. By the end of 1960, the membership totaled 224. At the King's College meeting W T Astbury and A V Hill were elected Honorary members.

The early years

The first Steering Committee of the BBS, J C Kendrew became the first Honorary Secretary and D D Eley Meetings Secretary, and the Committee elected J T Randall as its first Chairman and P B M Walker as Honorary Treasurer. Other committee members were S Brenner, J A V Butler, A F Huxley, R D Keynes, R D Preston, J W S Pringle, F J W Roughton and J T Weiss. From its inception the British Biophysical Society embraced a wide range of topics in Biology. The first major scientific meeting of the British Biophysical Society at King’s College, London (on The Structure of Globular Proteins and The Function of Proteins) and a report on proceedings written by Freddie (Herbert) Gutfreund (one of the Society’s founder members), appeared in the journal

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

BBS Today

The BBS has about 700 members in its newsgroup, and ~ 220 paying members. It is affiliated to EBSA and IUPAb The BBS committee meets three times a year, organizing and sponsoring both specialist and a more general meeting biennially, in the years that EBSA does not have its congress. BBS also supports travel bursaries for younger scientists, and is the adhering society to IUPAB ( Tony North was general Secretary of IUPAB for ~ 12 years, and a founding member of BBS) and EBSA (since its inception through the initial activities of Peter Bayley, former editor of Eur. Biophys. J), and is working with the Biophysical Chemistry group of the Royal Chemical Society, and the Biological Physics group of the

Institute of Physics The Institute of Physics (IOP) is a UK-based learned society and professional body that works to advance physics education, research and application. It was founded in 1874 and has a worldwide membership of over 20,000. The IOP is the Physica ...

. In 2007, BBS was the national society organizing the 6th EBSA/BBS congress at

Imperial College, London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

, with Mike Ferenczi (London) as the local organizer and Tony Watts (Oxford) as scientific chair, attracting over 1350 participants and ~800 posters. In 2010, the 50th Anniversary Symposium of the British Biophysical Society was held at

Robinson College, Cambridge Robinson College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1977, it is one of the newest Oxbridge colleges and is unique in having been intended, from its inception, for both undergraduate and graduate students of bo ...

and further biennial meetings have been in

Durham Durham most commonly refers to: *Durham, England, a cathedral city and the county town of County Durham *County Durham, an English county * Durham County, North Carolina, a county in North Carolina, United States *Durham, North Carolina, a city in N ...

in 2012 and

Warwick Warwick ( ) is a market town, civil parish and the county town of Warwickshire in the Warwick District in England, adjacent to the River Avon. It is south of Coventry, and south-east of Birmingham. It is adjoined with Leamington Spa and Whi ...

in 2014. In 2017, BBS and the Biological Physics Group of the Institute of Physics, jointly organized the IUPAB/EBSA/BBS/IoP Biophysics Congress in Edinburgh, with Tony Watts as Chair and Andrew Turberfield as co-chair of the congress.

Honorary members

2020: Stephen Harding, Simon Philips Alison Rodger 2019: Cait MacPhee, Chris Tate, Malcolm Weir 2018: Tony Watts, Rob Cooke 2017: Richard Cogdell, Paul Engel, Andrew Millar 2016: Dennis Noble, Bonnie Wallace, John Helliwell 2015: Tom McLeish, Eleanor Dodson, Jane Clarke 2014: Alan Cooper, Robin Leatherbarrow, Sheena Radford, Helen Saibil 2013: Dame Athene M. Donald, Dame

Carol V. Robinson Dame Carol Vivien Robinson, (née Bradley; born 10 April 1956Anon (2015) ) is a British chemist and former President of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2018–2020). She was a Royal Society Research Professor and is the Dr Lee's Professor ...

2012:

Hagan Bayley John Hagan Pryce Bayley FRS (born 13 February 1951) is a British scientist, who holds the position of Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford. Life and education Bayley was educated at The King's School, Chester, Balliol Col ...

, Mike Ferenczi 2011: Sir

Gregory Winter Sir Gregory Paul Winter (born 14 April 1951) is a Nobel Prize-winning English molecular biologist best known for his work on the therapeutic use of monoclonal antibodies. His research career has been based almost entirely at the MRC Laborator ...

and Judith Howard 2010:

Fran Ashcroft Fran may refer to: People and fictional characters * Fran (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters * Fran (footballer, born 1969) or Francisco Javier González Pérez * Fran (footballer, born 1972), Spanish retired football ...

Chris Dobson Sir Christopher Martin Dobson (8 October 1949 – 8 September 2019) was a British chemist, who was the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and Maste ...

Janet Thornton Dame Janet Maureen Thornton, (born 23 May 1949) is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). She is one of the world's leading researche ...

Venki Ramakrishnan Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is an Indian-born British and American structural biologist who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome" ...

2009:

Alan Fersht Sir Alan Roy Fersht (born 21 April 1943) is a British chemist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, and an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He was Master of Gonville and Caius C ...

, Jean Thomas 2008: Iain Campbell*, John Squire 2007: Jim Barber, Tim Bliss,

Guy Dodson George Guy Dodson FRS FMedSci (13 January 1937 – 24 December 2012), was a British biochemist who specialised in protein crystallography at the University of York.. Education Dodson graduated from the University of New Zealand where he was ...

, Gordon C. K. Roberts 2006: Peter Bayley,

Tom Blundell Sir Thomas Leon Blundell, (born 7 July 1942) is a British biochemist, structural biologist, and science administrator. He was a member of the team of Dorothy Hodgkin that solved in 1969 the first structure of a protein hormone, insulin. Blun ...

2005: Peter J. Knowles, Andrew Thomson 2004:

Louise Johnson Dame Louise Napier Johnson, (26 September 1940 – 25 September 2012), was a British biochemist and protein crystallographer. She was David Phillips Professor of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Oxford from 1990 to 2007, and later a ...

, David R. Trentham 2003:

Sydney Brenner Sydney Brenner (13 January 1927 – 5 April 2019) was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work ...

, Richard Henderson,

Olga Kennard Olga Kennard, Lady Burgen ( Weisz; born 23 March 1924) is a British scientist specialising in crystallography, and founder of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. Her research focused on determining the structures of organic molecule ...

2001: David Blow*, Ken Holmes 2000:

Pauline Harrison Pauline May Harrison (née Cowan) (born 24 August 1926) is a British protein crystallographer and professor emeritus at the University of Sheffield. She gained her chemistry degree from Somerville College, Oxford in 1948, followed by a DPhil i ...

, Robert Simmons 1999: Anthony C. T. North,

John E. Walker Sir John Ernest Walker One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 7 January 1941) is a British chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997. Walker is Emeritus Director an ...

1992: Lord Adrian*, E. R. Andrew*, H. (Freddie) Gutfreund, Alan L. Hodgkin*,

Andrew Huxley Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley (22 November 191730 May 2012) was an English physiologist and biophysicist. He was born into the prominent Huxley family. After leaving Westminster School in central London, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge ...

, Hugh E. Huxley, Aaron Klug, Roger Pain, David Phillips*, P. Walker, D. R. Wilkie*, Maurice Wilkins*, Robert J. P. Williams 1988:

Richard Keynes Richard Darwin Keynes, CBE, FRS ( ; 14 August 1919 – 12 June 2010) was a British physiologist. The great-grandson of Charles Darwin, Keynes edited his great-grandfather's accounts and illustrations of Darwin's famous voyage aboard into ''T ...

* 1982: Dan Eley,

John Kendrew Sir John Cowdery Kendrew, (24 March 1917 – 23 August 1997) was an English biochemist, crystallographer, and science administrator. Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Max Perutz, for their work at the Cavendish Labo ...

Max Perutz Max Ferdinand Perutz (19 May 1914 – 6 February 2002) was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew, for their studies of the structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin. He went ...

* 1981: R. D. Preston*, J. Randall* * deceased

References

External links

* {{authority control British biology societies Scientific societies based in the United Kingdom 1960 establishments in the United Kingdom Scientific organizations established in 1960 Biophysics organizations