High Attendance at This Year's AACR Annual Meeting

ORLANDO—Attendance at the 95th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research was better than for any year in recent memory, except for 2002 in San Francisco, organizers said. Just under 14,000 people—13,948, to be exact—were registered to hear or view the approximately 5,700 presentations. In contrast, the 2002 meeting drew 15,403 attendees, and there were 12,205 people pre-registered for the 2003 Toronto meeting that was aborted because of the SARS scare. While that cancellation meant that 2003–2004 President Karen Antman, MD, had only nine months in office, it didn't interfere with planning for the Orlando meeting, she said. “We had our first program committee meeting even before the Toronto meeting was canceled.” But sandwiching two conferences into nine months—the replacement meeting in Washington in July and then this year's in Orlando—meant considerable extra work for the AACR staff.Figure: Scenes from the Annual Meeting: (clockwise from top) AACR booth in the Exhibit area; AACR CEO Margaret Foti, PhD; President Lynn M. Matrisian, PhD (left) and 2003–04 President Karen Antman, MD; and Gregory M. Wahl, PhD, Program Chair.“It was really tougher for the staff than it was for us [the elected officers and committee chairs],” Dr. Antman said. The theme of this year's meeting was Information Integration for Innovation, and that's what registrants felt took place, said Program Chair Geoffrey M. Wahl, PhD, Professor of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. “People have told me how excited they are because we tried to do integration of information. I think it has been a fabulous conference, but I'm biased.” 2004-2005 President Lynn McCormick Matrisian, PhD, of Vanderbilt University, said the conference showcased “a lot of cutting-edge science, as well as discussion of the way the future should go.” A challenge for the 2005 annual meeting (April 16 to 20 in Anaheim, CA) and for the Association in general, will be to involve the public more in the discussions, she said. “We need to find out how to translate our information into the type of information that the public is interested in. We did have a very successful Public Forum [held this year as it has for the last several years, on the first day of the meeting], but it's such a small percentage of the population that we reach. We still have a long way to go.”

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