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Alex Hope was for many years a Foundation Professor of Biology in Biophysics and later Emeritus Professor at The Flinders University of South Australia. Throughout his career he strove to understand the energetics of plant cells, and devoted the latter two-thirds of his research career to the study of photosynthesis. His earlier, highly successful, research had focused on electrical properties and ionic relations of plant cells. The change of research direction, however, was only an apparent one, since a continuing theme was the role of electrochemical potential gradients in energy capture and conversion. His life work was ‘‘driven by electricity’’ (Hope 2002, 2004, 2006). Alex was born in Launceston (in Tasmania), the first Australian city to have hydroelectricity as early as 1895. Electricity was seemingly ‘‘in the air’’, as several members of his family appear to have made their careers based on electricity. Alex studied at The University of Tasmania, majoring in physics. During his Honours degree year in 1949, he chose to investigate the electric fields in and around plant roots and shoots, suggested by his supervisor Alexander Leicester McAulay as possibly contributing to developmental forces in plant growth. McAulay, Professor of Physics from 1926 to 1959 (and son of a professor of mathematics and physics), was almost certainly Australia’s first biophysicist, having pioneered the study of mutations caused in yeast by ultraviolet radiation. Decades later, Alex was instrumental in establishing in the Australian Society for Biophysics a prize for innovative biophysics to honour the memory of McAulay, helped by Alex’s generous personal donation in support of that prize. Reluctantly, Alex let the Australian Society for Biophysics extend the name of the prize to The McAulay–Hope Prize for Original Biophysics. In his PhD work (1950–1952), Alex continued under the supervision of McAulay to investigate the mechanism by which nutrient minerals entered plant roots, with financial support from an appointment as a Temporary Research Officer in the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) for the final 2 years. The CSIRO Division of Food Preservation and Transport, as it was then called, had a Plant Physiology Unit headed jointly by the influential (later Sir) R. N. Robertson (see Robertson 1992) and F. V. Mercer for the study of salt absorption by plant cells. Alex was appointed on the understanding that he would be available for future employment in the Division! W. S. Chow (&) Division of Plant Science, Research School of Biology, College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia e-mail: Fred.Chow@anu.edu.au

Alexander Beaumont Hope (1928–2008): an Australian biophysicist