History of the BSG

The Biological Structures Group is one of the special interest groups of the British Crystallographic Association. For decades it has brought the UK’s structural biologists together at its Winter Meeting and at the BCA Spring Meeting, and trained new generations through the CCP4-BCA summer school.

Origins

For much of the twentieth century, British crystallographers were split between two parent societies: physicists in the X-ray Analysis Group of the Institute of Physics, and chemists in the Chemical Crystallography Group of the Chemical Society, later the Royal Society of Chemistry. As crystallography spread into biology and materials science, the divide became harder to justify.¹

In 1979 a working party that included David Blow and Stephen Wallwork began designing a single national association. Their solution was a federal one: the existing physics and chemistry groups kept their links to their parent societies but also joined the new association, and two new groups were created for areas the old structure did not cover: biological structures, proposed by David Blow, and industrial crystallography.¹ The British Crystallographic Association held its inaugural meeting in Durham on 6 April 1982. It was attended by 127 people, who shared “a great sense of euphoria”, and elected Sir David Phillips as the first President and Dorothy Hodgkin as Vice-President.² David Blow’s Royal Society memoir counts helping to bring the BCA into being among his important services to British science.³

The Biological Structures Group has been part of the BCA ever since, alongside the chemical, physical and industrial groups and the Early Stage Crystallographers Group.

Help us write this history. The story of the group’s first winter meetings in the 1990s, its early committees and the people who shaped it is still to be written. If you have memories, programmes or photos (with permission from the people in them), please contact the BSG Secretary.

The Blue John trophy

The David Blow Poster Prize is awarded each year for the best poster at the BCA Spring Meeting. Its trophy was inaugurated in 1991: a piece of Blue John crystal on an oak plinth, both donated by Peter Harrison, owner of the Treak Cliff Cavern at Castleton in Derbyshire.

Blue John is a banded blue and yellow fluorite, found only in Treak Cliff. The crystal on the trophy was mined in 1760 from the top of the Witches Cave, in the “Cliff Blue” vein. It broke into three pieces when it was mined: one went to the Geological Museum in London, one to Manchester University, and the finest stayed on display at the cavern until it was given to the BSG. Its cubic morphology (space group Fm3̄m) is well defined, with concave faces and many visible lattice dislocations. The plinth was made by Castleton cabinet maker David Elliot from an English oak felled in the Lake District in 1977, and the silver plates were engraved by Peter Devine of Sheffield.

Adapted from an account by David Rice (1991), typed up by Elspeth Garman in 2016 and reproduced with permission. Read the full account (PDF).

The prize now carries the name of David Blow (1931–2004), a pioneer of protein crystallography at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Imperial College and one of the architects of the BCA, and the man who proposed the Biological Structures Group; the 2004 Winter Meeting was held in his memory.³

Sources