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 was "a world leader in transforming theoretical science into useful biomedical and clinical applications" and is considered "the founder of the biomedical photonics." He received the National Medal of Science in 1974.
He also was an Olympic athlete who won a gold medal in sailing for the United States at the 1952 Summer Olympics in the 5.5 Metre Class.
Chance was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. His parents were Eleanor Kent and Edwin Mickley Chance, president of United Engineers and Constructors, Inc, which built power plants. His father was also a mining engineer, chemist, and inventor who held a number of metallurgical patents and created a device that detected carbon monoxide in coal mines using a chemical reaction. Chance's paternal grandfather, Henry Martyn Chance, was a noted geologist and mining engineer who also had a medical degree.
When he was a teenager, the family moved to Haverford, Pennsylvania. His family had a summer home in Mantoloking, New Jersey where he learned to sail on his father's yacht Antares. He also sailed in Antilles and the Panama Canal Zone. When he was 13 years old, he became a licensed as a radiotelegraph operator and built his first powerful radio transmitter.
He graduated from the Haverford School in 1931. He attended the University of Pennsylvania where he received a bachelor's degree in physical chemistry in 1935, and a M.A. in microbiology in 1936. While at Penn, he was a member of St. Anthony Hall and of the professional and scientific honorary societies Alpha Chi Sigma, Sigma Tau, and Tau Beta Pi. He was also the business manager of The Pennsylvania Triangle, the engineering, architecture, and science student magazine. As a graduate student he developed a microflow version of a stopped-flow apparatus.
Around the time he was 17, he invented an auto-steering device for ships, receiving a patent in 1937. He tested the device on a trip to the West Indies using his father's yacht in 1935. In March 1938, the General Electric Company hired him to test the auto-steering device on a round trip from England to Australia on the MS New Zealand Star, a 20,000-ton refrigerator ship. In return, the company paid his tuition to Cambridge University.
In 1938, Chance enrolled in Cambridge University. He came back to the United States to visit his parents but was unable to return to Cambridge and England because of World War II. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania and received a Ph.D degree in physical chemistry in 1940.
In 1943, he received a second Ph.D. from Cambridge University in biology and physiology, followed by a D.Sc. from Cambridge in 1952.
In 1941, Chance became an assistant professor of biophysics and physical biochemistry in the school of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. During World War II, he worked for the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which was working on the development of radar. He became a member of the Steering Committee and head of the Precision Circuits Section, supervising some 300 physicists. They developed radar technology that allowed blimps to spot German submarines, as well as a "ground position indicator" to allow more accurate bombing. He also developed analog electronic computers to calculate non-linear processes and helped develop ENIAC, of the world's first general-purpose computer.
After World War II, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to work in Stockholm for two years with scientist Hugo Theorell at the Nobel Institute. Their work resulted in seven papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. It also let to Theorell winning the Nobel Prize in 1955.
In 1949, he 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 then appointed E. R. Johnson Professor of Biophysics and Physical Biochemistry (later renamed as Biochemistry and Biophysics) in 1964 and university professor in 1977.
Early in his career, Chance worked on enzyme structure and function, developing methods to study the pre-steady-state phase of reactions. He invented the now standard stopped-flow device to measure the existence of the enzyme-substrate complex in enzyme reaction.
He is considered the founder of biomedical photonics, which is now a research field covering biology, medicine, and physics. Starting in the late 1980s, he developed various near-infrared spectroscopy and photon diffusion imaging methods. He was also a pioneer in the 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 muscles, breast tissue, and the brain.
Chance became an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983. He became the president of the Medical Diagnostic Research Foundation in Philadelphia in 1995. He was visiting distinguished chair professor at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, from 2009 to 2010.
Chance published about 392 articles with 28947 citations (h = 92) as of 19 May 2022. The following is a selection of his key papers:
Chance, B. and Theorell, H. "Studies on liver alcohol dehydrogenase 2. The kinetics of the compound of horse liver alcohol dehydrogenase and reduced diphosphopyridine nucleotide." Acta Chemica Scandinavica. 5 (7–8): 1127—1144 (1951)
Chance, B. and Williams, G. R. "Respiratory enzymes in oxidative phosphorylation. I. Kinetics of oxygen utilization." Journal of Biological Chemistry. 217 (1) 383–393 (1955)
Chance, B. and Williams, G.R. "The respiratory chain and oxidative phosphorylation." Advances in Enzymology and Related Subjects of Biochemistry. 17: 65–134 (1956)