to the BSRA and prior ratification the executive committee. History Foundation The British society for research on ageing began as the "Club for Research on Ageing" formed by Professor Vladimir Korenchevsky (1880–1959). Korenchevsky trained as a clinician in the Imperial Military Medical Academy at Petrograd and, after serving as head of a military laboratory during the Russo-Japanese war, undertook postgraduate work with both Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (1908) and Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1910–11). By 1915 he held the position of Professor of Experimental Pathology at the University of Petrograd. After the October Revolution in Russia he joined to the White Army in the Russian Civil War, where he was an assistant to the general Anton Denikin on sanitary issues. After the defeat of the White Army he emigrated to Britain in 1920. He conducted research at the Lister Institute for Preventative Medicine in London from that time until 1945. Upon his retirement he founded the Nuffield Unit for Gerontological Research in Oxford where he worked until 1953. His primary research interest during his working life was the synthesis and action of sex hormones, an interest shared by several prominent members of the club for ageing in its early days. The precise date at which the "Club for Research on Ageing" was founded remains obscure but appears to predate Korenchevsky's visit to America in July 1939. It thus has a valid claim to be the oldest scientific society devoted to research into the biology of ageing in the world. It is certainly the one which achieved the most significant global results in terms of influence and dissemination. Whilst in the USA he met with Vincent Cowdrey and a group of like-minded American researchers who had just completed the multi-author textbook "Problems of Ageing: Biological and Medical Aspects". On Korenchevsky’s recommendation approximately twenty of these researchers formed ‘‘the American Division’’ of the Club for Research on Ageing. The first meeting of the "American Branch" of the Club for Ageing took place in early 1940 (early club members included Ross Harrison, Robert A. Moore and Edward J. Stieglitz). Evidence both for the continuing activities of the "British branch" of the club for ageing and for its continued contact with the American division is evidenced in the extant correspondence of Walter Bradford Cannon (1871–1945) the distinguished Harvard physiologist and in that of the great British biologist Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS (1890–1962) . In February