Introductory remarks about international and regional didactic cooperation on biophysics education

The development of biophysics as an independent discipline has followed various routes in the different countries. Biophysical researches have grown heterogeneously in the world depending on: a) the choice of basic or applied science mainly to be developed, b) financial resources, c) typology of the institution originating the research, d) the possibility and the ability to create conditions for the cooperation among specialists of different scientific areas. Modern biological researches need very close interdisciplinary cooperation and the biophysicist, a hybrid scientist, can understand enough of biology, physics and physical chemistry. Research and teaching in this field have not been developed at the same extent in the world, so there are countries preparing biophysicists and others where biophysical researches are so well developed but practically no finalized preparation to the students is given. In Italy, as an example, only a few universities have their own students of biophysics. International didactic cooperation must be further activated: 1) to help countries where the development could be more intensive, 2) to join students and researchers of biophysics belonging to different cultural areas, 3) to create the conditions to exchange researchers, 4) to promote common researches at international level, 5) to support the participation to international research programmes and the utilization of large scientific equipment. IUPAB-CEDB can constitute a permanent secretariat to promote and to organize activities to realize the above mentioned aims. Some proposals for activities to be sponsored by CEDB could be: 1) the organization of travelling courses or schools, 2) the organization of a textbook scheme or the development of basic monographs, 3) the use of satellites to broadcast courses (also multilingual) for an international distance education project or to run conferences, etc. Some EEC projects support a policy of international didactic and scientific cooperation (DELTA, COMETT, EUREKA, ERASMUS, etc.); biophysicists must participate not only with local approaches but with more ambitious programmes of work.