Special Issue Guest Editors

Britton Chance is amazing; he has won prizes ranging from an Olympic Gold Medal to the National Medal of Science. In preparation for writing this piece we have been sitting at my desk pouring over the incredible work Brit has done during his scientifc career. We have known Brit for over a decade, and have collaborated with him on many exciting projects related to optical imaging and spectroscopy in tissues. While pondering how best to proceed, a remark from a letter catches our attention. The comment notes that while many distinguished scientists have enjoyed ‘‘retirement’’ at similar stages in their careers, Brit has expanded his efforts to develop spectroscopy as a noninvasive analytical tool for clinical diagnosis. The interesting point for us, however, was that the comment was written in 1983 and refers to in-vivo NMR spectroscopy! Brit was 70 at the time. Britton Chance is one of the giants of biochemistry and biophysics. His vast contributions have opened new felds, and have changed the way we think about old problems. His research draws from many disciplines, particularly electronics, clinical medicine, biology and physics. Throughout his career Brit has repeatedly consumed groundbreaking ideas and techniques from the whole of science, and then redirected effort toward a critical problem that benefts from his integrating approach—all in a manner reminiscent of the feedback devices he knows and loves! Finally, his ability and desire to promote scientifc colleagues, and important science, technology, and application has arguably been as vital as his explicit scientifc contributions. In what follows we will highlight some of Brit’s achievements. This is not a defnitive account; such an account would result in a very interesting document, but would require more scholarly attention to detail. Instead we have drawn together bits of the story from conversations and a few extended interviews. Britton Chance was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1913, and shortly thereafter moved to Philadelphia, where he resides to this day. His interests in practical chemical engineering problems were stimulated by his father, who developed a chemical detector for carbon monoxide that replaced ‘‘canaries’’ in coal mines, and by his uncle, who worked with early fuidized beds using mixtures of sand and water to change the density of the resultant fuid so that slate foated to the liquid surface. Brit’s family loved boating, and he spent much of his youth in the bays of New Jersey. He learned about instruments that were critical for navigation, such as radio (wireless) communication and ship steering. His frst signifcant contributions to science and technology were in ship steering, while he was still a teenager. Ships weighing as much as 20,000 tons were diffcult to steer, and rapid feedback control was desirable in order to keep these very heavy objects moving on course. Brit used light refected from a mirror coupled to a compass needle to achieve this goal; when the ship got off course, both the compass needle and the refected light would move. Photodetectors were used to register the motion of the light beams, and a feedback signal was generated and used to redirect the ship steering mechanisms. The invention was patented, and Brit helped test it on a three-month trip from England to Australia in 1938 aboard the New Zealand Star, a refrigerator ship carrying tin to Australia and meat to England. Brit spent many summers during his youth sailing, fshing and experimenting with William Beebe and friends down in Antilles and the Canal Zone. Beebe was developing a bathosphere for extended underwater observations at the time, and one legend suggests that Brit beat out a young Ernest Hemingway in a race to catch a great blue marlin. The mounted marlin is still on the wall in the living room of Brit’s Philadelphia home. This love of sea and intense competitive spirit for boating would later prove useful in the 1952 Olympics, where he won an Olympic gold medal in sailing. The frst phase of Brit’s scientifc career in biochemistry and biophysics was spread between the University of Pennsylvania and Cambridge University. For certifcation he obtained two PhDs, one in physical chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940, and the other in biology/physiology from Cambridge University in 1943. His work focused on enzyme-substrate compounds, particularly their reaction kinetics. Glen Millikan was a critical collaborator at this stage. Millikan and Chance developed a stop-fow apparatus in which the ingredients of a chemical reaction are injected into a tube and are made to fow together down the tube; the reaction is then monitored at various points downstream corresponding to different time points in the reaction kinetics. The fow can be stopped, allowing the reaction to proceed, and then restarted in order to resolve the faster kinetics. Brit pushed this scheme to new levels of sensitivity and sophistication with the aid of J. P. Harvey. He developed a microfow version of the apparatus that was critical for studies of enzymes and their intermediates, because only small amounts of material were available for investigation. Downstream he used beams of light to interrogate the changing compositions