American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting gets underway despite Iceland's best efforts

Who could have predicted that the annual AACR conference would start off half-deserted due to a natural unlikely event like a volcano's eruption? But reality often can exceed imagination, and that is exactly what happened at the 101st AACR conference, which opened today at the Convention Center in Washington DC.

The opening ceremony, chaired by AACR director Tyler Jackson, took place with just fifteen minutes delay, notwithstanding important missing speakers of the first plenary session.

After a charming introduction given by the choir of Howard University, an impressive video showed the current numbers in the 'war against cancer'. Apparently the rhetoric of cancer as an enemy to fight, which was started in 1971 with the signing of the National Cancer Act of 1971 by then U.S. President Richard Nixon, is still mainstream, at least on this side of the ocean.

As a matter of fact, the 101st AACR conference has been named: "Conquering cancer through discovery and research", emphasizing the role that scientific research should play in translating discoveries from the bench to the bedside. The opening video, with its powerful accompanying music, reached its goal of injecting both enthusiasm and anger into the public -at least, it did so with me- as if preparing them not to listen to talks and seminars, but either to run a race or to fight in a war. (In the shorter term, it certainly reached the goal of keeping people awake).

The message that was to be passed on was that '2010' and 'Washington DC' were indeed the 'time' and 'place' to fight cancer, and all of us are the players in this war. Susan Sontag's 1978 book Illness as metaphor, where she described the military rhetoric about cancer in skeptic terms, came to my mind as now being more accurate than ever.

Before the plenary session was inaugurated by Charles Sawyer's seminal lecture on the mechanisms of resistance in prostate cancer, several important awards had to be presented. Janet Rowley, an elegant 85 years old, received the "AACR Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research" for her outstanding discovery of the Philadelphia chromosome translocation, which eventually lead to Gleevec and targeted therapy in CML.

The 4th annual AACR team scientist award was instead given to the Dana Farber/Harvard Medical School Thoracic Oncology Research Team, composed of 17 scientists working in various fields and awarded for the quality of their interdisciplinary work on the impact of genomic changes in EGFR in lung cancer, and the development of targeted therapies which are now under assessment in clinical trials.

One of the awards for 'Distinguished Public Service' was given to the current Director of the National Cancer Institute, John Niederhuber, for his 'commitment in the conquest of cancer' (in Tyler Jackson's words). John made a point to thank his 102 yr old mother, who apparently would like to see him back "to take care of patients" and was "not impressed" to hear about the award.

Finally, it was the turn of the recently awarded Nobel laureates to enter the floor: Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, who received the AACR tribute for their work (together with Jack Szostak who shared the Nobel with them) for discovering telomeres and telomerase. Blackburn and Greider's story represents an excellent prototype of what could be called a 'basic research' discovery, that unexpectedly had a great impact in applied research in oncology.