[Fiftieth anniversary of the French Society for Connective Tissue Research]

The Society was founded in 1962, at an international meeting organized at the Biomedical Institute rue des Saints-Pères, in Paris in the Department of Biochemistry headed at that time by Pr. Max F. Jayle, and published in the "Exposés Annuels de Biochimie Médicale" in 1963. At its beginnings a "Club", with a limited number of participants, it expanded rapidly into a Society, renamed recently "French Society of the Biology of Extracellular Matrix", with approximately 200 members working on a variety of subjects. Only six of these teams could present an oral report at the meeting of the Biological Society on January 18, 2012, celebrating this anniversary at the Curie Institute. A few more could send written contributions for this special issue of "Biologie Aujourd'hui". In this short introduction we shall recall some important stages of the developing connective tissue science. Besides such classical subjects, as the macromolecular components of connective tissue matrix, this discipline incorporated progressively receptors, integrins and other molecules, that mediate cell-matrix interactions.