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Conference Transcripts SARS in the Context of A New York Academy of Sciences Conference, Emerging Infectious Threats May 17, 2003 CONFERENCE TRANSCRIPT Welcome Ellis Rubinstein, Chief Executive Officer, New York Academy of Sciences An Academy Tradition of Convening Scientists Welcome to the New York Academy of Sciences. I think we have a packed room, so I think we should start. I am Ellis Rubinstein, the chief executive officer of the Academy, and it is a pleasure to welcome you all here. As some of you may know, I've been CEO here for only six months. That's in contrast to the fact that this place has been here for 186 years and, some people might not know, is the third oldest, I think, sci- entific society that's been continuously running, and it's had an extremely wonderful history in many ways. Thomas Jefferson was a member, and Darwin was a member, so it's been global for a long time. I guess in my mind some of the best things it has done is to convene people across disciplines and barriers on important topics. Some people here may or may not know that the Academy was the first organiza- tion to run a major meeting on AIDS. The meeting that we're going to hold here today is in keeping with a tradition that has gone back for some time of doing these kinds of important convening tasks. I would say, I think quite safely, that never in the history of the Academy could they have produced a meeting as rapidly as this one was done. It was only three weeks ago that I was talking to Dr. Ian Lipkin, who I am going to introduce in a bit, and we started speculating about whether there would be a need for a meeting that wasn't just a small meet- ing among coronavirus experts, or a big meeting like maybe the Geneva meeting, but something that would bring experts together across disciplines to talk about the interesting challenges that SARS is pre- senting. We were a little manic, we thought it would be a great idea, but we wondered whether we really could get an exceptional group together in such a short time, especially considering the pressure that people are under. Thanks to all of you here, we have done, I think, a remarkable job of bringing together a unique group, a unique mix of people. Reengaging with Scientists Because of the importance of the meeting I am going to resist the temptation of telling you too much about the Academy, but I do want to mention a couple of things for you, because I think that, before starting things off, this meeting typifies what you will see from the Academy in the coming months, as we do a kind of a Renaissance or a reengagement of the involvement of real scientists in this Academy. To explain that and give you a couple of examples, I just wanted to mention to you that as we sit here, 4,000 graduate students and postdocs in the New York area have joined this Academy in one fell swoop, and it'll soon be six or seven thousand, thanks to the deans of all the hospitals, universities and the inde- pendent research labs in the greater New York area, as far north as Yale. This is our future. A second thing that I wanted to mention is that in fall we'll be launching a series of seminars in the hottest fields of science: RNAi, tissue engineering, nanotech, imaging, and so forth. We'll be doing about a dozen of them, and the fact was that this meeting takes place because of the very conversation I was Columbia University DKV | New York Academy of Sciences | Mailman School of Public Health | NIAID © 2003 Columbia University. This Web site is being provided to you for your own use. Any copying or distribution of this Web site is prohibited. http://www.nyas.columbia.edu/sars 1 SARS in the Context of A New York Academy of Sciences Conference, Emerging Infectious Threats May 17, 2003 having originally with Ian about starting one in emerging infectious diseases, which we intend to do. For those of you interested in this topic, I hope that you've left your e-mail addresses, and if not please do, because we would be happy to let you know about this program when it starts in the fall. Academy Meetings on the Web Another feature that's going to be quite novel: we have been convening in New York for some time; now we'll be convening on really exciting topics. But how do we reach out to the rest of the world? You'll see in this corner and in the back of the room some cameras. They're being operated by a very innovative team at Columbia University called Digital Knowledge Ventures. Digital Knowledge Ventures was try- ing to learn how to create really interesting distance-learning Web products out of professors' classroom experiences. We're ganging together to try to do this from our seminars and our conferences that we hold here, so that people sitting anywhere in the world can join the conversation in these hot fields, and not have to, by the way, watch a linear Webcast where you have to watch for thirty minutes a little, tiny head and a bunch of PowerPoint slides, but rather come to a screen and in five minutes see the key points that were made—one minute and twelve seconds on this, and two minutes and fourteen seconds of that, click and get a quick briefing. If you want to go further you'll get links to all of the things that were behind that. This will be a perfect model of that, so all of you in this room will be able to come to our Web site at www.nyas.org and, starting on Tuesday, we'll have the raw talks as they exist with the questions and everything else up online for you. Then in the ensuing week or two the Digital Knowledge Ventures team will be enhancing that, so that there will be a really nice educational experience that will provide links to other exciting things related to the topics that we're discussing here. I recommend that if you yourselves don't, since you've participated in it, want to go to it you recommend it to others. Meeting Cosponsors I need to thank very quickly our cosponsors who have made this meeting possible. Columbia University plays another role in this meeting; it's launching a brand new Center for Global Health and Economic Development. If you're interested in what that might mean, the dean of the Mailman School of Public Health, Dr. Allan Rosenfield will be here later, he's not quite here yet. Over lunchtime you can find out more about that. Also, of course, I want to thank the NIAID, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Tony Fauchi and John La Montagne are helping with this. I am very pleased and thankful to our pharma friends, Pfizer and also Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck Research Labs, and Novartis, and many of you folks here are from those companies. This is very exciting for us because it starts a partnership that is going to be evolving into the discussion groups that I was mentioning. We're very pleased to finally find ways to bring together industry scientists and academic scientists on a regular basis, here in New York and through the digital products. If any of you are interested in that, I'll be happy to tell you about it. We're in late-stage discussions with a lot of the heads of research in a lot of those companies, and we're quite excited about it. Heroism in the Face of SARS To introduce this topic, I just want to mention, I have had a fairly long career as a science journalist, and so I have known a lot of scientists and a lot of journalists, and I have had a lot of high points in my career, not least when I was the editor of Science for the last decade. But I can't remember many occa- sions when I associated something with true heroism on the part of some scientists and some journalists. This has really been a kind of a unique circumstance, and I thought I would mention it, because I have © 2003 Columbia University. This Web site is being provided to you for your own use. Any copying or distribution of this Web site is prohibited. http://www.nyas.columbia.edu/sars 2 SARS in the Context of A New York Academy of Sciences Conference, Emerging Infectious Threats May 17, 2003 been thinking about it a lot for the last few weeks. In Singapore and in China, some of our friends on the scientific and medical front and the journalists there have been at incredible risk to their own personal safety. One of the people, who will be presenting through Scott Hammer, who I am going to introduce in a minute, is Chen Zhu, a person we know very well, who's the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, assigned by the Chinese government to oversee the entire scientific effort there. He is not only risking his own personal safety—right now I think he's in the south of China—but he submitted, in the midst of unbelievable pressure, PowerPoints for this meeting, and you'll be seeing them.
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