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A LETTER TO ISCB MEMBERS & COLLEAGUES
CELEBRATING MANY MILESTONES TOGETHER
By Burkhard Rost,
President and BJ Morrison McKay, Executive Officer
A
milestone is one of a series of numbered markers placed along a
road… Milestones are placed to provide reference points…
(Wikipedia). This year ISCB is reaching and celebrating many
milestones on its path to continued growth. Each of these milestones
marks an advance in our field as well as in biomedical sciences.
Each advance contributed to the good of life. We could all be proud
to be part of that!
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Burkhard Rost,
President |
BJ Morrison McKay, Executive Officer |
5, 10, 20, 50,
and even 100 years… These are the milestones we are celebrating
throughout 2012. For such a young society in a field that was full
of new and massive challenges just a few short years ago, we are
pleased that bioinformatics and computational biology have achieved
a level of incontrovertible recognition for building essential tools
that advance biological research, and we salute the longevity of the
following conferences and institutions:
5 Years In 2012 ISCB held the Fifth Annual Conference on
Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences (CSHALS). This meeting is
the result of a proposal brought to ISCB by members Eric Neumann and
Ted Slater, and remains the only meeting ISCB organizes that focuses
on a single, specialized topic, and that features applications
specific to hospitals and pharmaceutical research and development.
Since its inception CSHALS has been held in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, USA, but the idea of rotating with a European
location or starting a European version of this event is open for
consideration. If this interests you and you would like to get
involved please let us know – new initiatives can only move forward
with support from our community and the commitment of volunteers to
lead the way.
10 Years The Rocky
Mountain Bioinformatics Conference (Rocky), held every year in
Snowmass/Aspen, Colorado, USA, was started ten years ago during an
ISCB Board of Directors meeting. At that point ISCB revenue was
derived completely from ISMB. Larry Hunter, a founder of both ISMB
and ISCB and ISCB's first president, suggested during this meeting a
first step toward diversify with a small ISCB meeting in Colorado.
Originally conceived of as a regional meeting, Rocky drew an
international attendance from the beginning, and has grown to
welcome over 150 people annually from around the world. The meeting
is well known for offering lengthy networking breaks in the middle
of the day, but the real beauty of Rocky is that virtually everybody
who wishes to present their research can do so either as a 7-10
minute flash presentation, or as a poster. A lot of science is
presented at this 2 ½-day meeting, and is balanced by substantial
networking on the slopes or in town during the mid-day breaks.
20 Years ISMB is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year
in Long Beach, California, USA. In its very first year ISMB drew 200
people to Bethesda, Maryland, USA, for a gathering of researchers
applying artificial intelligence to the study of molecular biology.
Although the scientific foundation of the meeting remains true to
its original core concept, the ISMB of today bears little
resemblance to that of 20 years ago. By the fifth ISMB in Halkidiki,
Greece, during which the ISCB was founded as a professional society
to serve our community, the collective total number of talks barely
exceeded 200. At the 20th ISMB in Long Beach, more than 200 talks
will be presented.
This jump in
participation was caused by moving from a single papers track
(through 2003), to parallel papers tracks thereafter, to the truly
multi-track meeting format introduced at ISMB/ECCB in Vienna (2007).
Tracks have their own "life" and "identity" and we have experimented
over the years with how to optimally define those tracks. Last year
at the ISMB/ECCB in Vienna (our second meeting in that city), we
introduced the Oral Poster Presentations - short talks selected from
among the best poster submissions. In Long Beach we have even more
of this due to an overwhelmingly positive reaction. This year, we
dare another leap: we combine the Proceedings and Highlight tracks
during the presentation (they remain separate entities for the task
of reviewing). The rationale was to avoid too much overlap and
"running around." We will need your feedback on how you liked this
novelty. Now that we have hopefully managed the worst overlaps, we
can consider coordinating even the topics during the smaller tracks,
namely Late Breaking Research, Oral Poster Presentations, and
Technology. This will be another challenge that we hope to approach
for next year's ISMB/ECCB in Berlin, Germany.
At our 20th Anniversary ISMB, we have made many efforts
to present exceptional science and have also planned presentations
and social events facilitating this milestone celebration. We hope
that you will be joining in all of the fun this week in Long Beach.
50 Years The U.S. Congress authorized establishment of the
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) in 1962,
making this its 50th anniversary year. From the start the NIGMS
mission has been to conduct and support research and training in the
general or basic medical sciences. Within NIGMS there are six
divisions, and although the Division of Biomedical Technology,
Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology may prominently feature
among PIs within our discipline, our community members and
conference attendees certainly interact with all the NIGMS divisions. In recognition of
this Golden Jubilee we are offering two Special Sessions organized
by NIGMS in Long Beach.
100 Years
This year the Federation of American Societies for Experimental
Biology (FASEB) celebrates its centennial and recently partnered
with NIGMS for joint celebrations in Washington DC. At just 15 years
old, ISCB has a long way to go until our own centennial, but we are
inspired by FASEB's long history of accomplishments in the promotion
of the scientific agenda in the U.S., and can learn much from their
governance model as they successfully work on behalf of the shared
interests of 26 different professional societies.
Arguably, the association with FASEB has been one reason for
another important recent achievement of ISCB, namely the publication
of strong stances for open access, spearheaded by Rick Lathrop
chairing the ISCB Public Affairs and Policy Committee (R Lathrop et
al. (2011) Bioinformatics 27:291-4; R Lathrop et al. (2011) PLoS
Comput Biol 7:e1002014). This strong endorsement of open access was
also the basis of two letters that ISCB sent this year to the
members of the U.S. Congress to express our strong support in favor
of open access to scientific literature resulting from research that
is publicly funded. Rick Lathrop directed this initiative, and you
can read about both of these actions in this newsletter and then
take action of your own using the text of ISCB's letter as your
template.
Global Society Also
this past year ISCB has finally realized the last important leap
toward the realization of another dream, namely that of becoming a
society that routinely organizes meetings in both the Northern and
the Southern hemispheres, and one on each of five continents (North
America, Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia) at least every two
years. The last important step was the organization of
ISCB-Asia/InCoB in December 2011 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Sheila
Nathan chaired this first ISCB-Asia as a joint meeting with the 10th
anniversary InCoB meeting organized by APBioNet (Asia-Pacific
Bioinformatics Network). ISCB Board member Paul Horton chairs the
second ISCB-Asia in December 2012 on the BGI campus in Shenzhen,
China.
Just four months ago the
second ISCB-Latin America was a resounding success -- with 240
participants - in Santiago, Chile, under the leadership of ISCB
member Francisco Melo, who chaired the conference brilliantly. The
next event in that series will be held in 2014 as a joint meeting
with the Brazilian Association for Bioinformatics and Computational
Biology's 10th anniversary X-Meeting (due to this collaboration
ISCB-Latin America 2014 has been moved to October instead of its
regular window in mid-March). ISCB-Africa is already moving well
through the planning process for our third conference organized
together with ASBCB, the African Society for Bioinformatics and
Computational Biology, being held next March and chaired by Alia
Benkahla in Tunis, Tunisia. Each of these new "ISCB-x meetings" has
the goal of bringing the international and local scientific
communities together for shared investigation and collaboration. We
salute the conference chairs named above, each of who has put so
much energy into creating a truly amazing meeting. Please be sure to
join us as many of these upcoming events as your schedule allows!
Throughout this newsletter you will find other ISCB
announcements and profiles: the ISCB 2012 prize winners Ziv
Bar-Joseph (ISCB Overton Award) and Gunnar von Heijne (ISCB Senior
Scientist Award); the seven new ISCB Fellows (Bonnie Berger, Peter
Karp, Jill Mesirov, Pavel Pevzner, Ron Shamir, Martin Vingron,
Gunnar von Heijne); and Stacy Slagor as the newest full-time
addition to our professional staff.
For the second time, you can vote for ISCB officers (members of the
ISCB Executive Committee) and Student Council Leaders at ISMB. The
election starts online on July 3rd and concludes both online and in
person in Long Beach through the end of ISMB on July 17th.
In 2012, ISCB is passing a series of
milestones that mark so many achievements. This is a moment in time
to be proud of being part of such a dynamic and exciting young
professional society. ISCB continues to be small. This means, we are
nothing without your active contribution. Becoming and staying a
member is an important first step. We all need more from you. Thanks
for contributing to our growing community. May we share many
milestones ahead!
BJ
Morrison McKay
Executive Officer
Burkhard Rost
President
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