The Biophysical Society after Six Years

Abstract

A DECADE after the close of World War II, when most American scientists had completed the transition to their peacetime programs, the research accomplishments and opportunities in the emerging field of biophysics became sufficiently strong, despite the disparate professional aims and backgrounds of the several biomedical, biochemical, physical, and engineering component groups, to bring about the amalgamation of these groups in a national Biophysical Society in 1957. Valuable aids at this crucial time came from the Air Force, which provided the funds to underwrite the organizational meeting, and from the National Institutes of Health, through its Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry Study Section which was then in the midst of its biophysics-stimulating activities culminating in the month-long study program at Boulder, Colorado, in 1958 and the publication of the lectures on biophysical science.1 The rapid growth of the Grants Program of NIH and of the newly established National Science Foundation implemented the research plans not only of the long-established biomedical group but also of the crucial complement of brilliant physicists and engineers who had turned from nuclear physics and engineering for new inspiration and constructive goals in the life sciences. The program pattern of the Society's meetings quickly became stabilized: In addition to sections of contributed papers, three half-day plenary sessions-comprising half the time and one-seventh of the total number of sessions scheduled-were devoted to symposia on subjects of sufficient maturity and significance to warrant bringing to the attention of the entire membership. The number of contributors and invited speakers at the six annual meetings ranged between 270 and 360, the number of attendees averaged 750, while the membership reached 950 in 1962. The ratio of speakers having primary professional affiliation with universities to those working in governmental, research, or industrial establishments is about 2:1. This unexpectedly low ratio probably reflects the fact that research in new interstitial, multidisciplinary areas is in some respects easier in organizations where the research itself is the primary concern than in universities where teaching and established disciplines with vested departmental interests and programs also play a significant role. (This situation is particularly pronounced in Continental practice where university structure and curricula are even more rigid than in the United States. In Germany, for example, universities provide few if any formal curricula in biophysics, though substantial investigative programs in biophysics are being conducted in research establishments, particularly in the laboratories of the Max Planck Institutes. The university program in Great Britain, less rigid didactically, more closely resembles that of the US in this respect.) Research trends in the biophysical sciences are reflected in the symposium subjects and in the topics of the contributed papers. By the mid-fifties the rapid expansion and accomplishment in the area which one of its pioneers, W. T. Astbury, called "molecular biology" had already become clearly evident. Here the goal is to fractionate, isolate, identify, and characterize individual components of biological systems-cell, tissue, or organism-with the hope thereby to discover the role of components in the functioning of the system. The components of primary interest are large macromolecules, hierarchically intermediate between diffusible organic molecules and cells. Only molecules of such size and complexity possess the diversity of structure and properties needed for many life processes and for the evolutionary significance ascribed to them. Dealing with real molecular components in aqueous systems, this aspect of molecular biology may be thought of as "wet biophysics." From this productive salience in the 1 Oncley, J. L., F. O. Schmitt, R. C. Williams, M. D. Rosenberg, and R. H. Bolt, editors. Biophysical Science--A Study Program. 1959. Published in Reviews of Modern Physics, 81, No. 1, pp. 1-268, and No. 2, pp. 269-568, and by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 568 pages. 2 Borrowed from the First Klopsteg Lecture, entitled "BiophysicsWet and Dry," delivered at Northwestern University by the author on January 9, 1962. To be published by Northwestern University. In press.