16 September 2025
by Saurabh Chand Sagar
My name is Saurabh Chand Sagar and I am a Drosophila cell and developmental biologist currently undertaking my doctoral studies at Banaras Hindu University, India. As an attendee of the Biologists @ 100 conference, I enjoyed the seamless integration of cellular science with its repercussions on physiological processes and behavioural patterns, further exploring these effects on climate change and biodiversity conservation. The Company of Biologists demonstrated its commitment to sustainability by minimising environmental impact through eco-friendly practices at the conference. …
18 August 2025
One of the key missions of universities and research institutes is to educate the future generations of teachers and researchers. Therefore, it is key to integrate sustainability in the ongoing training. Currently, many science curricula lack sustainability. More universities now offer specific sustainability courses, but an integration in all courses has not happened. To integrate sustainability (including environmental, social and financial aspects), a general embedding will be needed. …
23 June 2025
The Company of Biologists works hard to support innovation that can accelerate sustainable development in the academic event industry. One of the latest projects we have supported through our Fund for Innovations in Sustainable Conferencing is The Pavilion for People, an exciting experiment that was part of the 2025 UN Ocean Conference. The Pavilion for People was an online space created by utilising already existing technology in a new creative way, allowing people from all around the world to interact, share their ideas and make commitments for protecting the oceans. …
29 April 2025
Some contributors to the carbon footprint such as energy use, business travel and ventilation may be more obvious to researchers. What is often less understood in a lab is the direct and indirect impacts of the materials used to conduct research. Using high grade materials requires a lot of different resources. …
26 February 2025
The consumable products in the lab, such as tubes, vials, enzymes and other reagents, are often the major contributor to the lab carbon footprint. For universities that calculate a complete carbon footprint for the entire institute (e.g., Copenhagen University and UCL), lab consumables stand out as one of the major contributing categories. Though an exact carbon footprint of a single product is often lacking (we often do not have enough data for a complete life cycle analysis), there are tools like spend-based methods which can help to get a good overview of the total impact of a single product. …
8 September 2025
by Léa Manke
My journey to the Biologists @ 100 conference began early on Saturday morning. Clutching my thermos filled with coffee, I made my way to the major train station in Paris, France, Gare du Nord. A light drizzle was falling on the city, turning Paris into a shiny mirror of lights while the sun was slowly rising. Arriving at the station, I saw the first cafes and brasseries opening while the waiters were urging the customers to place their orders. I arrived with enough time to buy myself a hot croissant and continue to passport control. Once passed, I comfortably settled in the waiting area munching my breakfast and reading my crime novel. Time went by in a blink and my train to London St. Pancras, UK, was called out ready for boarding. As I got on the Eurostar, the realisation settled in that in less than 3 hours, I would arrive in one of my favourite cities in Europe. …
15 July 2025
We are excited to release our event carbon calculator for academic events.
We are keen to support biologists and organisers in the process of creating academic events and we encourage them to reflect on the CO2 emissions that these events will generate. We acknowledge the difficulty of developing a sustainable strategy with minimal guidance, so we created an event carbon calculator to help gain insight over the main drivers of the CO2 emissions generated by their event. …
12 May 2025
We were delighted to celebrate our 100-year anniversary with incredible biologists at our Biologists @ 100 conference in March 2025. We celebrated this unique moment with a careful approach to sustainability in every aspect of organising.
We kept sustainability at the forefront of our minds when planning the conference and thank everyone involved in helping us make this vision real. We summarise below the ways in which sustainability played a key role at Biologists @ 100. …
21 March 2025
In the light of climate change, biologists are working together to find a way of running scientific meetings in a more sustainable manner. We are putting a call out to everyone (biologists or not) to share with us their ideas to innovate event organisation to have a lower environmental impact.
Write an essay of maximum 1,000 words to detail how your idea will change scientific events organisation and will open the door to a new concept of organising events in the next 10 years.
The best ideas will be rewarded. The winning essays will be rewarded with £250 for first prize, £150 for second prize and £100 for third prize. The winning essays will be selected by our Sustainability Committee and will have the opportunity to feature on our website. …
3 February 2025
Doing experiments in a lab setting has many advantages. It allows you to focus on a single aspect without the interference of outside influences. Creating these artificial conditions relies on a range of equipment, from computers to incubators and cooling devices. In addition, biologists, chemists and physicists have learned to hijack biological processes such as DNA amplification (using PCR) and DNA modifications (changing the genetic code using CRISPR). These methods rely on sterile conditions, precise temperature control and pure reagents to work well. Thus, modern research allows for groundbreaking discoveries, but it also requires high-end energy intensive equipment. …
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