Following the recent retirements (within a few months of each other) of Peter Timmins and Roland May, ILL was delighted to organise a one-day symposium in  honour of its two distinguished scientists. The event took place on 20 January 2010 and highlighted the major contributions that Peter and Roland have made to neutron scattering since the technique was first applied to structural biology back in the 1970s.

The speakers were a good reflection of the broad scope of Roland and Peter's scientific interests, covering not only their important findings on multicomponent biological structures, such as membrane proteins, and their assembly in membranes, and large interacting nucleic acid-protein and protein-protein complexes, but also the on-going methodological developments that have made these findings possible.

Just like our two heroes, the atmosphere at the symposium was both studious and friendly, and the Scottish dancing went on late into the night!