In 2004, to mark the 80th birthday of John Beynon, the founding Editor of Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry (RCM), the publishers (John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.) established an annual award named the 'RCM Beynon Prize'. This award, consisting of a monetary award of $1000 (US) plus a certificate for each contributing author, is awarded by an ad hoc Sub-committee of the Editorial Board of RCM, based on the following criterion.

The prize will be awarded annually to the corresponding author(s) of the paper, published in RCM over the previous two calendar years that, in the opinion of the Awards Sub-committee, describes an innovative advance in mass spectrometric instrumentation or methodology that has had the greatest immediate impact in its particular sub-discipline.

The winning paper of the 2010 RCM Beynon Prize, judged to best fit this criterion among papers published in RCM in 2008 and 2009, is "Quantification of human insulin-like growth factor-1 and qualitative detection of its analogues in plasma using liquid chromatography/electrospray ionisation tandem mass spectrometry" by Michael Bredehoft, Wilhelm Schanzer and Mario Thevis, of the Institute of Biochemistry, German Sport University, Cologne, Germany (Rapid Commun. Mass Spectrom. 2008; 22: 477-485).

The prize was awarded to Dr Mario Thevis who also accepted the award certificates for Dr Bredehoft and Dr Schanzer, who could not be present, during the Business Meeting of the ASMS Conference in Salt Lake City in May 2010.

The photograph shows Dr Thevis holding the certificate with Paul Trevorrow from Wiley (left) and the RCM Editor-in-Chief, John Monaghan (right).

RCM wishes to congratulate Dr Bredehoft and his colleagues for an imaginative piece of work that well exemplifies the daring approach to methodology development that characterized the career of John Beynon.