Société Francophone de Chronobiologie

L'étude des rythmes du monde vivant

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History of the SFC (term for Société Francophone de Chronobiologie)

SFC, French speaking Society of Chronobiology, was formed on 23 January 1969, at the first formal Meeting of the Society. But at that time, its name was “Group of Study of Biological Rhythms", GERB for “Groupe d’Etude des Rythmes Biologiques". In 1986, the term SFC appeared after GERB. It is only in 1998, at the 30th General Meeting that the society was renamed as SFC.
Immediately on its creation, SFC was a multidisciplinary French speaking society devoted to the study of Biological Rhythms. The founders had in mind the study of the temporal aspect of alive phenomena with their ability to be repetitive. For them, techniques of analysis of temporal series were used – essentially, the “cosinor" at that time- to the detriment of a more general biology interested in rhythmicity origins as well as in its statistical features. Gradually, a certain synonymy appeared between biological rhythms and chronobiology in the mind of scientists as well as of people in general. Furthermore, the chronobiology term being more and more frequently used in foreign societies led up our Society to take a new name.

The "Francophone" term for French speaking, was used at the time when the English language was not used everywhere as it is now the case and when oral and written communications of foreign scientists were made in French. Many Belgian, Canadian, German and Swiss colleagues were and are still listed as members in the Society Council. Now, for the communications, the English language is used as well as the French one.
The Society has always got a multidisciplinary approach and wishes to keep it. The Society fosters the broad interdisciplinarity of the scientific field which uses multiple perspectives (e.g. genetic, molecular, cellular, anatomical, neurophysiological, system, comparative, evolutionary and behavioural) makes its original features and its main interest in a more and more specialized environment. It gathers researches involved in various topics such as molecular biology, biochemistry, zoology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, agronomy, veterinarian sciences, and so on. For a long time, the Society has included a group devoted to theoretical biology in which the chaos, the limit cycle notion were regularly studied and presented to the other attendees. Now, this group does not exist any more but lectures concerning those topics are still given. For the Human Sciences, they are gathered in another Society that we keep up rare but good relationships with. In the statutes of the Society, it is notified that the Council composition must reflect the diversity of the topics and also the members' number assigned to Plant and Animal Biology, Medicine, Psychology and Theoretical Biology.
SFC holds a plenary meeting every year at the invitation of a member or a members' group. The meeting is generally held in spring. Special meetings may be organized to the request of commissions interested in one given topic. In 2003, the Society is joined by 220 members who paid their subscription. The Society has established relationships with other European societies, in particular the ISC, which has organized twice its Annual Meeting with.
Bernard Canguilhem
Traduit par Françoise Eclancher, CNRS Strasbourg

Since September 2005, the SFC has been affiliated to the European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS). This means that when paying their regular membership to the SFC, all members of the SFC become automatically members of the EBRS (http://www.ebrs.info/)

The President’s Note

The French speaking society (SFC) formed in 1969 was initially named : Group for the Study of Biological Rhythms or GERB (for Groupe d’Etude des Rythmes Biologiques). It is only since 1998 that this Society has been renamed SFC. It is a French speaking society with many topics devoted to the study of all biological rhythms. SFC is a society with numerous French colleagues but includes Belgian, Canadian, German and Swiss attendees interested in many topics ranging from the molecule to the organism in Human Sciences and Life Sciences with Biological rhythms as the common factor. In contrast to many scientific societies connecting members around a certain topic, SFC is multidisciplinary and its broad inter-disciplinarity makes its obvious interest and this contributes to its durability as evidenced by the so diversified specialties of the successive presidents of the society. Transverse relations between attendees and the French speaking aspect are the essential features allowing not only free scientific exchanges but also social interactions. They are beneficial for everybody in the working groups as well as at the annual meeting traditionally organized by one of the society members. The SFC journal “RYTHMES" represents a link between all the members and gives announcements of events related to the chronobiology (Research and Teaching). The SFC Web Site has been created since a few years and is updated in order to answer to the requirements of the Web communication: the discussion forum in particular, should permit a new way of relationship between the members all involved to maintain a certain dynamism in our Society.

Traduit par Françoise Eclancher, CNRS Strasbourg

Concerning Chronobiology

Chronobiology is a subject in full expansion with applications developed in various domains, for example :

• The best time at which we should take a drug to optimize its action and/or to reduce its side effects.
• The importance at the physiological level, of rhythmic phenomena responsible for performance variations.
• The knowledge of biological rhythms of plant and animal species, and of their ability to get synchronized depending on the environmental changes.

How to become a SFC member

Adhesion to SFC is based on the sponsoring principle. For this reason, it is not possible presently, to register directly on line.

If you wish to become a member, please download and print the application form. After having filled it out in its entirety, remit the paper application with payment to :

Confidentiality policy

One of the goals of our association is to allow members to establish relationship with the other attendees. This implies to draw up lists of names, addresses and possibly of topic specificity. Our lists are not secret but confidential and are intended for researchers interested in Chronobiology. They cannot be used in any case for any advertising or any non scientific purpose. Our members may ask for not being listed or for being listed but with some special requirements. Since the SFC Web Site has been created, members may bring information about themselves directly and at any time (by the connection with "the membership Web Site" link).

Furthermore, members may modify their form whenever they want in order to suppress their name from the electronic directory. They also have the possibility to let their name visible in the members' list, but with their coordinates masked.

Traduit par Françoise Eclancher, CNRS Strasbourg

"RYTHMES" : the SFC journal

"RYTHMES" is a quaterly journal published by SFC. Its purpose is to inform about the recent scientific activity of SFC members. "RYTHMES" promotes knowledge in Chronobiology and represents an essential link between the French speaking chronobiologists who can communicate their scientific results to others. It also brings some information about scientific events (conference meetings, seminars, teaching courses, theses, etc…) as well as job ads. "RYTHMES" exists owing to the active participation of SFC members. Subscription to this journal is included in the membership of the Society. The various issues are sent to all the members by @ mail or by a paper version on request. A link on the SFC Web Site gives a free access to the issues of earlier years as well as to the guidelines for any scientific communication submitted for publication in "RYTHMES". Manuscripts must be sent to Fabienne Aujard (fabienne.aujard@wanado.fr), chief editor of the journal. Every proposed manuscript is submitted to a review committee made up by SFC members. The whole editorial staff of "RYTHMES" commits itself to propose a high-quality journal to its readers and encourages contributions of any kind to facilitate relationship between SFC members.

Traduit par Françoise Eclancher, CNRS Strasbourg

Guidelines for manuscript writing

To participate to the life of SFC, you have to send your manuscripts to Fabienne Aujard, chief editor of "RYTHMES".

Only the online manuscript submission by authors are accepted, with text and figures in black and white or in colour. This guarantees the quality of the published paper that you can all the more appreciate it as for reading, you choose the electronic version which is in colour.

You must send your manuscript in attached document. The files are preferentially saved in .rtf, .doc or .txt format after having been prepared with a standard word processor. For any other format, Please, ask us!

It is imperative to send us a text file without any carriage return (enter) at the end of lines while keeping accents. In the same way, don't include white lines to separate paragraphs and avoid non conventional frame for your manuscript.

Figures may be in tiff, bmp, gif, jpeg, jpg, png or epsf. "RYTHMES" is processed with a PC, thus PC formats are preferred in order to avoid many changes.

Finally, you have to send your writings by @mail to ((fabienne.aujard@wanado.fr) with a copy to (jean.francois.vibert@upmc.frjean.francois.vibert@upmc.fr and (beau@vjf.inserm.fr.

Traduit par Françoise Eclancher, CNRS Strasbourg

SFC online services

SFC proposes various services on its Web Site. Most of those services are open to everybody for reading but reserved to members only, for writing. Thus, SFC members may bring some information that Web Site visitors may look through current events, job announcements and bibliographic references.

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