Professor Helen Hansma receives RMS Honorary Fellowship

The RMS is delighted to award an Honorary Fellowship to Professor Helen Hansma – widely regarded as ‘the mother of biological AFM’.

Helen is Emeritus Biophysics Research Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, UCSB, where she has worked since 1972. From her early career onwards, she became renowned for her ability to work across different fields and boundaries. Helen investigated diverse topics, from the chemistry of zinc-azine coordination compounds to the ionic mechanisms for membrane excitation in Paramecium.

She became a pioneer of the application of AFM to biology in topics ranging from Teflon films to biomaterials, including lipid films and synaptic vesicles, DNA, RNA and DNA-protein interactions, laminin and other macromolecules of the basement membrane, and bacterial biofilms.

Her work in the early 1990s, showing that DNA molecules could be imaged by an AFM in liquid, transformed biological microscopy. Due to her early application of AFM to biology, Helen is considered  as “the mother of biological AFM”.

Helen also led some of the first efforts to produce high-throughput AFM and 'force spectroscopy'. Her work with AFM revealed the astonishing mechanical mechanisms of spider-silk molecules, which are nature's 'bio-steel.'  Many people followed the path she opened with her successful work on the molecular mechanics that underlie the behaviour of natural fibres, biological adhesives and biology’s mechanical structures. For this reason she is also considered one the founders of the field of bionanomechanics.

In recent years, Helen has put forward an exciting and provocative hypothesis for the origin of life on Earth. She believes that mechanical energy could have driven the processes that gave rise to early life in the absence of chemical energy. Helen pioneered the origins model postulating that the motion of mica sheets (the most popular substrate of AFM studies of biomolecules in solution) could have driven chemical reactions energetically uphill, resulting in higher-energy molecules that are characteristic of life on Earth.