Thanks for gravity, DNA and the internet

The Royal Society is a fellowship of 1,400 outstanding scientists. It exists to expand knowledge, support science and guide policy across the world. And it is 350 years old this week (end of November 2010).

The society originated from an “invisible college” of natural philosophers who began meeting in the mid-1640s to discuss the new philosophy of promoting knowledge of the natural world though observation and experiment (ie, science).

On its official foundation date of 28 November 1660, a group of 12 men met at Gresham College, London, after a lecture by Christopher Wren, then a professor of astronomy, and decided to found “a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning”. This group included Wren himself, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Sir Robert Moray and William, Viscount Brouncker.

The society’s motto, Nullius in verba, roughly translates as “Take nobody’s word for it” and is an expression of the fellows’ determination to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.

It is now the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, with more than 60 Nobel laureates among its fellows and foreign members. Its fellows have given us gravity, evolution, the electron, the double helix of DNA and the internet.

Letters to the society record such milestones as the first blood transfusions and the confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

In 1769 the naturalist Daines Barrington reported tests confirming that Mozart was a child genius. And, in 1776, Captain James Cook wrote that he had saved his crew from scurvy by giving them sweet wort (beer-makers’ malt infusion), sauerkraut, lemons and vegetables.

The society today acts as a scientific adviser to the British Government and the UK’s Academy of Sciences, as well as funding research fellowships and scientific start-up companies.

Every year, the society names 44 scientists as fellows in recognition of their achievements. The accolade is the highest a scientist can receive short of a Nobel prize. Well known pharmacist fellows include Sir Joseph Swan, inventor of the incandescent light bulb, and Sir David Jack, whose research team discovered salbutamol, beclometasone and ranitidine.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s Hanbury memorial medal was instituted in honour of another eminent pharmacist fellow, Daniel Hanbury, elected a fellow in 1867. More currently, Malcolm Stevens, emeritus professor at the University of Nottingham, whose team discovered temozolomide, was elected in 2009.