New RMS Honorary Fellow Announced


The Royal Microscopical Society has announced Professor Brian J Ford as a new Honorary Fellow of the Society.


Professor Ford is a microscopist and former chartered biologist who has made a signifi cant contribution to microscopy and biology and to the popularisation of these fi elds; a resident in Cambridgeshire, he is known internationally for his thought-provoking lectures, books and broadcasts.


Professor Ford began his studies in botany and zoology at Cardiff University in 1959, leaving in his second year to set up his own laboratory. His early work was in plant physiology, publishing in Nature a theory on plant excretion which gave rise to the new science of phytoremediation. He has published on the microscopy of forged photographs, food science, microbiology, forensic analysis, cell microscopy and blood coagulation, to name just a few and is currently publishing on the complexity of the living cell.


Brian J. Ford


Professor Ford was awarded a Kodak Bursary in the 1970s and used this to fund a Research Associate position back at Cardiff University. His fi ndings on early microscopy were published in numerous papers and books including, The Revealing Lens, Mankind and the Microscope and The Optical Microscope Manual. The Japanese edition of his book Microbe Power led to new technologies for microbial recycling. In the 1980s Professor Ford unearthed the original microscopical specimens sent by Leeuwenhoek to the Royal Society in the seventeenth century, resulting in his book The Leeuwenhoek Legacy. In the 1990s he compiled the fi rst digital microscope manual for a scheme that gave a microscope to every state school in England and later Wales. In 2006 he was appointed Visiting Professor at Leicester University and recently he was asked to authenticate two newly discovered Leeuwenhoek microscopes. You can read Professor Ford’s infocus article on these microscopes on the RMS infocus library at www.rms.org.uk/infocus-library.


Professor Ford has appeared as a panellist on Any Questions? has been a correspondent for Newsnight and for many years featured on Round Britain Quiz. He gained a record BBC Audience Reaction Index with his science programmes, presented his own weekly series including Science Now and Where Are You Taking Us? and was nominated for the Italia Prize by the BBC. He writes a regular column in The Microscope and in the past has contributed to The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and the Evening Standard. Professor Ford was also awarded the inaugural Köhler Medal in America.


Professor Ford was elected a Fellow of the RMS in 1962. He has served as Chairman of the Committee for the History of Biology and Fellow at the Institute of Biology, is President Emeritus of the Society for the Application of Research at Cambridge University, and Honorary Surveyor of Scientifi c Instruments and Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. He is a former Fellow at the Open University, is a dining member of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, an Honorary Member of Keynes College, University of Kent and a Fellow of Cardiff University where he was for many decades a member of the University Court.


On receiving his Honorary Fellowship, Professor Ford said “The list of RMS Honorary Fellows is an astonishing catalogue of such very distinguished names, I cannot easily express the magnitude of this generous gesture. I would like to thank the RMS Council for their thoughtful endorsement; it is accepted with overwhelming humility and warm appreciation.”


Professor Brian J Ford will be presented with his Honorary Fellowship at mmc2017. You can register to attend the Congress on the mmc2017 website www.mmc-series.org.uk


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Electron Beams Tuned to Chemical Reactions


A multi-national team of scientists from the UK, Germany and Russia have succeeded in capturing inter-molecular reactions using the electron beam of a transmission electron microscope (TEM) as a stop-frame imaging tool. They have also discovered that the electron beam can be simultaneously tuned to stimulate specifi c chemical reactions by using it as a source of energy as well as an imaging tool. This research – which shows chemical reactions happening in real time at one hundred-millionth of a centimeter - has the potential to revolutionise the study and development of new materials. It could help answer some of the most fundamental and challenging questions of chemical science; such as how molecules react with each other at the atomistic level; what drives formation of one product instead of another; as well as aid the discovery of brand new chemical reactions.


The team was led by Andrei Khlobystov a Professor of Nanomaterials at the University of Nottingham’s Nanoscale and Microscale Research Centre. “This is a signifi cant scientifi c breakthrough. We have transformed the way we use TEM – from taking still images to


a tool for fi lming and stimulating chemical reactions. It is the fi rst time we have been able to watch chemical reactions at this level and observe the fate of molecules as the chemical reactions take place - from the starting molecules all the way through to the product.”


The research, carried out by experts in synthetic and theoretical chemistry, materials and electron microscopy and builds on Professor Khlobystov’s concept of carbon nano test tubes, (World’s tiniest test tubes, Guiness Book or World Records 2005) where the nanotubes act as a container for molecules. His pioneering work on carbon nanocontainers and nano-reactors is already leading to new ways of directing molecular assembley and studying chemical reactions.


Elena Besley, a Professor of Theoretical Computation Chemistry and her team of researchers working in the Computational Naoscience Laboratory at Nottigham collaborated on the project. “Delving into the tiniest chemical building blocks of matter, our study harnesses the ‘observer effect’ and establishes an entirely new methodology for studying chemical reactions. We demonstrate that the electron


beam, simultaneously acting as an imaging probe and a source of energy to drive chemical transformations, offers a new tool for studying the chemical reactions of individual molecules with atomic resolution, which is vital for the discovery of new reaction mechanisms and more effi cient future synthesis,” she said.


Professor Khlobystov said: “We named our method ChemTEM because it is the most direct way of studying chemical reactions: the electron beam delivers well-defi ned amounts of energy directly to the atoms within the molecule and thus triggers a chemical reaction, whilst continuously imaging the molecular transformations, frame- by-frame in direct space and real time. We can discover new chemical reactions and make bespoke chemical structures by playing with the conditions of the TEM – for instance the energy of the electron beam.”


The research was published in ACS Nano 42242pr@reply-direct.com


York Funding Boost for Cryo-EM Equipment


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The University of York’s Department of Chemistry has been awarded £1.6 million to invest in equipment used to investigate the three dimensional structures of biological molecules.


The funding, which will be used to invest in cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) equipment , was awarded by the Wellcome Trust. Cryo- EM is a form of microscopy used by structural biologists in which biological samples are fl ash frozen to extremely low temperatures allowing them to be studied in the electron microscope in their native states –how they exist within a living cell.


Cryo-EM is transforming areas of science essential for improving health, from seeing how drugs get into cells or visualising the atomic-level structure of a virus to aid vaccine development. The funding will allow scientists to address important biomedical questions that were simply unanswerable a few years ago.


Professor Gideon Davies, from the Department of Chemistry, said: “Cryo-electron microscopy is one of the most exciting developments


of recent years. We are extremely grateful for the generosity of Tony Wild and the Wellcome Trust in funding this initiative. We are looking forward to analysing the complex atomic structures of viruses and of proteins involved in human disease here in York.”


Professor Keith Wilson, from the Structural Biology Laboratory at York, said: “Every now and again, there are technological advances that are both unexpected and disruptive, and that have a profound effect on the way that a key area of science is done. This is the case with cryo-electron microscopy for looking at biological structures, which is one of the most exciting developments of recent years.”


Head of Department Professor Duncan Bruce added: “To have been able to acquire this technique in York underpins further the world- class structural work for which we are well known and I very much look forward to the exciting science that will follow.”


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