Britton "Brit" Chance ForMemRS (July 24, 1913 – November 16, 2010) was an American biochemist, biophysicist, scholar, and inventor whose work helped develop spectroscopy as a way to diagnose medical problems.

[1] His parents were Eleanor Kent and Edwin Mickley Chance, president of United Engineers and Constructors, Inc, which built power plants.

[12][3] His family had a summer home in Mantoloking, New Jersey where he learned to sail on his father's yacht Antares.

[10] In March 1938, the General Electric Company[19] hired him to test the auto-steering device on a round trip from England to Australia on the MS New Zealand Star, a 20,000-ton refrigerator ship.

[20] He came back to the United States to visit his parents but was unable to return to Cambridge and England because of World War II.

[1][13][20] In 1941, Chance became an assistant professor of biophysics and physical biochemistry in the school of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

[4] After World War II, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to work in Stockholm for two years with scientist Hugo Theorell at the Nobel Institute.

[9] In 1949, he became a professor of biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and was appointed the second director of the Eldridge Reeves Johnson Foundation for Research in Medical Physics, a position he held until 1983.

[14] Early in his career, Chance worked on enzyme structure and function, developing methods to study the pre-steady-state phase of reactions.

[24] He is considered the founder of biomedical photonics, which is now a research field covering biology, medicine, and physics.

The following is a selection of his key papers: Chance was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1950.

[14][8] He became a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1958, and served on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee from 1959 to 1960.

[32] In 1986, he gave the keynote address at the 152nd national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia.

[20] In July 1952 in Helsinki, Finland, the US team won an Olympic gold medal in the 5.5 Metre Class, with Chance serving as helmsman and captain of the Complex II.

[6] In February 2010, he married his research associate and biochemist, Shoko Nioka, Ph.D. in Taiwan in a traditional Chinese ceremony.