The birth of a new field

摘要

In September 2011, a proposal was submitted to the Royal Society to hold two, 2-day workshops on the application of free-electron X-ray lasers to biology by Dame Professor Louise Johnson FRS, Henry Chapman and John Spence. The first 2 days, at the Royal Society in London, were to be devoted to biological applications, and the second 2 days following, at Chicheley Hall, on instrumentation development and data analysis methods. The conference was the first in an annual series to be supported on this theme by the new US National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Center on Biology with X-ray lasers.