30 years of sanibel symposia: Structure and activity of biomolecules

To summarize the significance of the Sanibel Symposia in the field of “Structure and Activity of Biomolecules” is a Herculean task, meaning summarizing 30 years of the development of Quantum Biology in 30 minutes, which gives 1 minute per year. How does one do it? There are obviously many ways in which this cannot be done. One a priori conceivable way was to determine the most important (in the lecturer's eyes) contribution, discovery or paper for each of these consecutive 30 years and to present a list of potential laureates of what we could consider as an imaginary yearly Löwdin Prize. The author has tried the game but found it impraticable. A more reasonable solution seemed to be to trace the history of the main intellectual lines in the methods and themes which prevailed in the development of our knowledge on the Structure and Activity of Biomolecules during the period involved. It quickly turned out, however, that the scope was again so wide and its snapshot representation, the only feasible one, so dense and compact that it would have been reduced to the mere enumeration of the dozens of important, fundamental techniques and problems which have been dealt with during that time. So the author gave up this project too. Finally, after much hesitation, his choice went to a third procedure: the selection of the most important intellectual concept which had the most important impact on the development of the quantum‐mechanical contribution to our understanding of structure‐activity relationship in biomolecules. I believe this concept to be that of the electrostatic molecular potential, the introduction of which enabled the decisive step of moving over from the study of the structure and activity of small biomolecules or small constituents of the fundamental biomacromolecules to the study of these properties in the biomacromolecules themselves. Examples will be given which illustate this opinion.