Regional Biophysics Conference 2012: an anniversary and a milestone for applications of biophysics in medicine

This issue of the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) presents a series of articles from the Regional Biophysics Conference (RBC) organized in Kladovo, Serbia on September 3-7, 2012. This was the fifth conference in the RBC series, a small but notable anniversary. In the opening speech, Dr Marjeta Šentjurc, the veteran biophysicist from the Jožef Štefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, focused on the development of the RBC initiative starting from the first meeting in Zreče, Slovenia in 2005. She pointed out that this initiative was a continuation of and an upgrade to the previous Yugoslav Biophysical Society (YBS) meetings, which were traditionally organized each year for more than 40 years – since November 1970. In fact, the initiative for establishing an organization that would gather researchers from the field of biophysics was announced already in 1966 at the Board of the Federal Council for the Coordination of Scientific research, which allocated some funds to the Institute of Physics of the School of Natural Sciences University of Belgrade, Serbia for this purpose. Director of the Institute, Prof. Aleksandar Milojević, PhD and Head of the Biophysics Department at the Institute of Biology in Zagreb, Croatia, Siniša Maričić, PhD, organized a meeting of 26 scientists from the field of biophysics on June 26, 1970 in Zagreb. At the meeting, the Board of the Initiative for Biophysics was elected with the members: B. Beleslin, J. Herak, I. Pavlič, Č. Radenović, and S. Svetina. Their role was to organize the first Yugoslav Scientific Meeting on Biophysics in Krapinske Toplice, Croatia in November 1970. At the meeting, the YBS was founded, the aim of which was to organize further regular meetings and establish the post-graduate school of biophysics. The presentations from the meeting were published in the international journal Periodicum Biologorum printed in Croatia. Since then, the meetings were organized regularly each year at venues in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, and later in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The last YBS meeting took place in Rogaška Slatina in Slovenia. The meetings have always had a very strong biomedical component and facilitated network-building in the region. Also, besides scientists from the former Yugoslavia, the meeting gathered a considerable number of scientists from Italy, Austria, and Hungary, so it marked a beginning of many collaborations, some of which still last and include a great number of younger scientists. In this respect, these activities heralded today’s trends of multidisciplinarity in research sustained through networking and opening up more opportunities for young researchers. Moreover, stress has always been placed on applicability of research, primarily in biomedicine.