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Cross-fertilization among fields: a seminal event in the progress of biomedical research.

The theme of this presidential address is the importance of cross-fertilization in biomedical research, and the role of this meeting in facilitating such cross-fertilization. We are now finishing the first full day of a completely reorganized Clinical Research Meeting. The changes should be apparent to all. The TriSociety Council has dramatically revised the meeting to counter a trend of declining attendance and abstract submissions (Fig. 1). Attendance has fluctuated over the past decade and a half, but last year's attendance of 2690 was down 34% from the peak year of 1986. Equally distressing is the steady decline in abstract submissions at the uncannily constant rate of about 200/yr for the 5 years from 1989-1993 (Fig. 2). This may reflect a trend toward presenting one's best abstracts at subspecialty meetings rather than at a general meeting such as this one, or it may reflect dissatisfaction with the abstract presentation sessions. To counter these trends, the TriSociety Council felt that a dramatic change in the meeting was necessary (1). The format being tested this year is the result (Fig. 3). The leveling off of abstract submissions this year may indicate interest in this new format. We hope the interest will be sustained. One major change is in the way abstracts are presented. For several years, participants have shown a preference for invited talks. However, one important function of these meetings has been to provide a forum for young investigators. To satisfy both needs, we have converted to a format in which all oral presentations will be by invited speakers and all abstracts will be presented in poster discussion workshops. We have invited well-known experts in each field to make "professor's rounds" on the posters, and then to chair a discussion workshop immediately following the poster viewing. Lively discussions led by a well-known expert should entice greater participation. More fundamentally than this structural change, we hope to move this meeting away from a compendium of concurrent subspecialty meetings and toward the real niche it should occupy, to provide a single place where one can hear the most exciting new developments in all of medicine. To accomplish this, every morning, we have planned a two-hour set of "Yearin-Medicine" sessions, in which one will be able to hear the four or five most exciting breakthroughs in each subspecialty, chosen with input from the subspecialty societies. In addition, because important themes in research do not always correspond to traditional subspecialties, we have planned 12 theme sympo-