The birth of a new field

In September 2011, a proposal was submitted to the Royal Society to hold two, 2-day workshops on the application of free-electron X-ray lasers to biology by Dame Professor Louise Johnson FRS, Henry Chapman and John Spence. The first 2 days, at the Royal Society in London, were to be devoted to biological applications, and the second 2 days following, at Chicheley Hall, on instrumentation development and data analysis methods. The conference was the first in an annual series to be supported on this theme by the new US National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Center on Biology with X-ray lasers.We were therefore most grateful to the Royal Society when it agreed to financially support these workshops, which began on 14 October 2013. About 80 scientists attended each workshop, coming from many countries, at which half-hour talks were given by 15 leaders in the field at each workshop, together with poster sessions. The speakers were then invited to submit papers for this special issue of Philosophical Transactions, in which the resulting 26 papers are published. ..