Britton Chance: Pioneer of Biomedical Photonics
Britton Chance (July 24, 1913 – November 16, 2010) was an American biochemist, biophysicist, scholar, and inventor whose work helped develop spectroscopy as a way to diagnose medical problems. He received the National Medal of Science in 1974 and is considered the founder of biomedical photonics.
Early Life and Education
Chance was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Eleanor Kent and Edwin Mickley Chance, president of United Engineers and Constructors, Inc. His father was a mining engineer, chemist, and inventor who held metallurgical patents and created a device to detect carbon monoxide in coal mines. His paternal grandfather, Henry Martyn Chance, was a noted geologist and mining engineer with a medical degree.
The family moved to Haverford, Pennsylvania when Chance was a teenager. He learned to sail on his father’s yacht Antares at their summer home in Mantoloking, New Jersey, and sailed in the Antilles and Panama Canal Zone. At 13, he became a licensed radiotelegraph operator and built a powerful radio transmitter.
Chance graduated from Haverford School in 1931. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, earning a bachelor’s degree in physical chemistry in 1935 and an M.A. in microbiology in 1936. As a graduate student, he developed a microflow version of a stopped-flow apparatus. Around age 17, he invented an auto-steering device for ships and received a patent in 1937. General Electric hired him in 1938 to test the device on a ship traveling from England to Australia, paying his tuition to Cambridge University in return.
Chance enrolled at Cambridge in 1938 but returned to the United States to visit his parents and could not go back because of World War II. He earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940, followed by a second Ph.D. from Cambridge in biology and physiology in 1943, and a D.Sc. from Cambridge in 1952.
Career and Achievements
In 1941, Chance became an assistant professor of biophysics and physical biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. During World War II, he worked at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, where he became head of the Precision Circuits Section, supervising about 300 physicists. His team developed radar technology that allowed blimps to detect German submarines and created a “ground position indicator” for more accurate bombing. He also developed analog electronic computers for calculating non-linear processes and helped develop ENIAC, one of the world’s first general-purpose computers.
After the war, Chance received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work in Stockholm for two years with Hugo Theorell at the Nobel Institute. Their collaboration produced seven papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and contributed to Theorell’s 1955 Nobel Prize.
In 1949, Chance became a professor of biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and was appointed the second director of the Eldridge Reeves Johnson Foundation for Research in Medical Physics, a position he held until 1983. He was named E. R. Johnson Professor of Biophysics and Physical Biochemistry in 1964 and university professor in 1977.
Early in his career, Chance focused on enzyme structure and function, developing methods to study the pre-steady-state phase of reactions. He invented the stopped-flow device, now standard in laboratories, to measure the enzyme-substrate complex. Starting in the late 1980s, he developed near-infrared spectroscopy and photon diffusion imaging methods. He was a pioneer in numerical simulations of biochemical reactions and metabolic pathways. In the 2000s, he developed molecular imaging beacons for cancer detection and diagnosis, predicting cancer aggressiveness in muscle, breast tissue, and brain.
Chance became an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. He served as president of the Medical Diagnostic Research Foundation in Philadelphia from 1995 and held a visiting distinguished chair professorship at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan from 2009 to 2010.
Notable Events and Milestones
Chance won a gold medal in sailing for the United States at the 1952 Summer Olympics in the 5.5 Metre Class, demonstrating his skill as an athlete alongside his scientific achievements. By May 2022, he had published approximately 392 articles with 28,947 citations and an h-index of 92, reflecting the broad impact of his research across multiple disciplines.
Awards and Honors
Chance received the National Medal of Science in 1974, the highest science honor in the United States. His contributions to biomedical photonics and spectroscopy earned him recognition as a world leader in transforming theoretical science into practical biomedical and clinical applications.
Additional Resources
Readers seeking more detailed information about Chance’s life and scientific contributions can consult his Wikipedia biography and other biographical archives. His published papers and the institutions where he worked—particularly the University of Pennsylvania and the Eldridge Reeves Johnson Foundation—maintain additional records of his research and legacy in biomedical science.
Observer Voice is the one stop site for National, International news, Sports, Editor’s Choice, Art/culture contents, Quotes and much more. We also cover historical contents. Historical contents includes World History, Indian History, and what happened today. The website also covers Entertainment across the India and World.
