Significance of FEBS to world biochemistry

Abstract

Biochemistry, like other branches of natural sciences, has its roots in Europe. In the period between the two world wars, although America was beginning to play a more important role, European biochemists still dominated the subject, and discoveries that form the basis of the most elementary teaching of biochemistry were reported particularly in Biochemische Zeitschrift and the Biochemical Journal. The world’s biochemists gathered together with the chemists and the physiologists in Internation Congresses organized by the Internation Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, and the International Union of Physiological Sciences, respectively. Biochemistry had, however, long become an independent discipline and a few years after the end of the 19391945 war, the first International Congress of Biochemistry was held in Cambridge in 1949, and steps were taken which led to the formation of an International Union of Biochemistry, constituted along the lines of other scientific unions affiliated with the International Council of Scientific Unions. The historic Cambridge Congress was followed by equally successful ones in Brussels (1952) Paris (1955) Vienna (1958) and Moscow (1961). At each of these Congresses the great advances in biochemistry that were being made in the two decades after the end of the war were reported to the assembled world’s biochemists. It is at first sight paradoxical that the first five Congresses were all held in Europe, because the balance in world biochemistry, as in many other matters, had shifted from Europe to U.S.A. Although individuals and individual laboratories in England, France, Germany and Sweden made contributions as important as any made in the U.S.A., the great bulk of the information that is now to be found in any reasonably comprehensive treatise on biochemistry was coming