The third annual meeting was held , as tratition
wants, in Fribourg. Due to the large number of prospected
presentations (31 program-internal teams) we decided to prepare for
this year a 2-days program (7 and 8 October 1999). The attendance was
around 200 people. For these intense two-days we had a total of 57
contributions:
43 program-internal abstracts;
7 guest abstracts;
7 invited plenary lectures
Here some impressions that I gathered from the
fresh feed-backs:
The 5 min poster
advertisements were unanimously
considered to be useful and stimulating and the presenting persons
brilliantly outlined the spirit of this type of presentation:
'flashy and charming'. I particularly appreciated the fact that
many presentations were made by junior fellows and not by their
PIs: a refreshing experience!
For the first time we could give a stage time
for all the guest
abstracts and I hope that this will
encourage future participations of program-external contributors
to our annual meeting.
On top, we had some important communications
concerning ethical / biosafety and
technical aspects about clinical materials, and this is a premiere in our meeting's history. In
particular, we discussed also the implications of the recent
reported accidental death of a gene therapy treated young
patient.
The plenary
lectures were felt to be instructive,
stimulating and entertaining. I must acknowledge that all the main
speakers took an extra effort to honour this meeting with very
comprehensive overviews of their specific field of competence and
that the over 70'000 km that they had to cumulatively travel were
really worth!
We thank the following people/institutions
for their contribution to this year's success:
The invited speakers :
(I. Verma, L. Mitchell, C. Steer, H. Pandha, M. Grace, P. O'Hare,
D. Losordo)
The companies MWG Biotech and Compucyte
The Department of Chemistry, School of
Engineering, Botanical Garden
The Ruscolab secretariate: T. Häberlin,
D. Pedrioli
