American Society for Cell Biology

On 6 April 1959 the United States National Academy of Sciences passed a resolution for the establishment of a "national society of cell biology to act as a national representative to the International Federation for Cell Biology".

The ASCB was first organized at an ad hoc meeting in the office of Keith R. Porter at Rockefeller University on May 28, 1960. In the 1940s, Porter was one of the first scientists in the world to use the then-revolutionary technique of electron microscopy (EM) to reveal the internal structure of cells. Other early ASCB leaders—George Palade, Don Fawcett, Hewson Swift, Arthur Solomon, Montrose Moses, and Hans Ris—also were EM pioneers. All early ASCB leaders were concerned that existing scientific societies and existing biology journals were not receptive to this emerging field that studied the cell as the fundamental unit of all life.

The ASCB was legally incorporated in New York State on July 31, 1961. A call for membership went out, enlisting ASCB's first 480 members. The first ASCB Annual Meeting was held November 2–4, 1961, in Chicago, where 844 attendees gathered for three days of lectures, slides, and movies showing cellular structure. The results of a mail ballot were read out and Fawcett was declared ASCB's first president.

The ASCB did not remain an EM society. New technologies and new discoveries in molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry, and light microscopy quickly widened the field. Cell biology has continued to expand ever since, extending its impact on clinical medicine and pharmacology while drawing on new technologies in bioengineering, high-resolution imaging, massive data handling, and genomic sequencing.

By 1963, the membership consisted of 9,000 scientists.

In 2008 it was reported that ASCB had 11,000 members worldwide. Today, 25% of ASCB members work outside the United States). Annual meetings now draw upwards of 5,000 people. Since 1960, 32 past or current ASCB members have won Nobel Prizes in medicine or in chemistry.

At the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in San Francisco in 2012, scientists developed the Declaration on Research Assessment, which calls for scientific output to be measured accurately and evaluated wisely.

It also calls for scientists and institutions to reevaluate the use of impact factor to assess individual scientific efforts.