The transformation of the biological sciences in post-war Europe.

Abstract

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) will celebrate its 40th birthday next year. This seems like a good opportunity to take a closer look at how EMBO came into being in 1964, and at the driving forces that established this first European organization to represent molecular biology. Investigating the origins of EMBO also allows us to explore the history of molecular biology in Europe and how it changed from a marginal specialty into a well‐established practice in most fields of experimental biomedicine. > When EMBO was informally created in Ravello, it was just a ‘club’ of life scientists who wanted to promote molecular biology research in Europe Like many other institutions, EMBO has its official history, and the canonical version was laid down in a sample copy of The EMBO Journal by John Tooze, former Executive Director of EMBO: “In December 1962, immediately following the Nobel Prize Investiture ceremony, John C. Kendrew together with James D. Watson visited the Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) in Geneva on their way home from Stockholm. Leo Szilard, the nuclear physicist‐turned‐molecular biologist, was also in Geneva at the time. Having decided that the Cuban missile crisis [October 1962] might lead to war he had left New York and had taken refuge in Switzerland. During the course of a conversation the three visitors had with Victor Weisskopf (CERN Director General), Leo Szilard proposed that Europe's molecular biologists should attempt to emulate their colleagues in particle physics and try to persuade their governments to establish an international laboratory for molecular or fundamental biology patterned on the CERN model. […] The upshot was a meeting held at Ravello, Italy on 16–17 September 1963. [A group of molecular biologists] discussed the possibility of international cooperation in fundamental biology. The group decided that a European organization was a more …