The Canadian Society of Biochemistry, Molecular & Cellular Biology (CSBMCB) celebrates its 50th birthday in 2007

Abstract

The origins of the CSBMCB may be found in the Canadian Biochemical Society that was founded in 1957 by the local Biochemistry groups in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto that formed the new society from members that had met under the auspices of the Canadian Physiological Society, the Canadian Institute of Chemistry, or the Royal Society of Canada. The inaugural meeting of the Canadian Biochemical Society was at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario on 10 June 1988. The first president of the CBS was Professor A. M. Wynne of the University of Toronto. Of course biochemistry, as with all science, has evolved rapidly and in 1992 the society’s name was changed to the Canadian Society of Biochemistry, Molecular & Cellular Biology to reflect more accurately the interests of its members. Canada is the second largest country but with a small population of 32.7 million and CSBMCB decided to concentrate its resources on hosting one high quality meeting per year and to alternate these meetings between the rest of Canada usually at Banff, a resort town in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and in the East in Ontario or Quebec. These are excellent focused meetings and attract an international audience. In fact, in recent years we have seen a surge in our foreign membership and we always welcome new members. The 2007 CSBMCB 50th Conference will be held from 5 – 9 July 2007 in Montreal on ‘Systems and Chemical Biology’. These dates coincide with the Montreal Jazz Festival (http:// www.montrealjazzfest.com/) a major event in North America and we look forward to welcoming old and new friends to a meeting with an outstanding programme (http://www. csbmcb.ca/e_index.html). There is a distinguished history of biochemistry in Canada. At McGill University in Montreal, biochemistry had been introduced into the medical curriculum by Robert Ruttan in 1887, and the first departments of Biochemistry in Canada were those at McGill University and the University of Toronto which were founded in 1907; at about the same time as biochemistry departments elsewhere (1, 2). From the pioneering studies on insulin by Banting, Best and Macleod in Toronto and the development of the method for the extraction of active insulin from pancreas by Collip in the Department of Biochemistry, McGill University, Montreal, to another more recent Nobel Prize for site-directed mutagenesis to the late Mike Smith, Canadian Biochemistry has played a prominent international role. Although funding for science in Canada has lagged behind that of many other nations and despite the small size of the biochemistry community there has always been a considerable international impact of Canadian biochemistry. This has in the past unfortunately resulted in a loss of some leading Canadian biochemists to Europe and the USA, but the Canadian lifestyle and the quality of undergraduate and graduate education in Canada has also attracted outstanding scientists to Canada. This reversal of our ‘brain-drain’ has been helped in the past few years by the determination of successive governments to invest in research. This has resulted in the birth of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research that funds operating grants and training awards; the Canada Foundation for Innovation that funds equipment and also the many new research buildings that are being constructed across the country and the Canada Research Chairs Program that has reinvigorated the research in our universities. The future is bright for research and biochemistry in Canada.