DR. SMITH: Good morning. My name is Jay Smith. On behalf of the Society of Urologic Oncology, I would like to welcome everyone to today's meeting.

I'm going to start by just giving a very brief history of this meeting, because it is a relatively brief history, but one which has really emerged, or allowed this meeting to emerge into what I think is a major force in urologic oncology. Everyone who has been associated with the development of this is very proud of where the meeting has gone, and I think that's reflected by today's program, which looks to be outstanding.

The meeting is jointly sponsored by the Society of Urologic Oncology(SUO) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). But I also have to say that the lion's share of the credit should go to Marston Linehan and the staff at the NCI, who have been instrumental in putting the program together, organizing the logistics, arranging the speakers, and even providing financial support for it. So the Society of Urologic Oncology as a co-sponsor is very much indebted to the NCI, and in particular to Marston Linehan.

So again, we have an ambitious program. We have one that hopefully will allow for lots of discussion, lots of input from not only the speakers and the panels, but also from the individuals attending the meeting.

I'm going to go ahead now and introduce Marston. Who is going to go over some logistical aspects of things as well as the program itself. And again, on behalf of the SUO, I want to extend personal gratitude to you for putting this meeting together.

DR. LINEHAN: Thanks, Jay.

I think the NCI, of course is very happy with having the opportunity to work with the SUO on this meeting. We very are very appreciative of Dr. von Eschenbach and Carl Barrett, who is the director of the Center for Cancer Research, for helping us to support this meeting. We would also like to thank Laura Anthony of Matthews Media for doing just a terrific job in helping put this meeting together, and also tolerating me making all sorts of last minute changes in this meeting.

The one last thing I want to say is about the poster sessions. I'm thrilled about the fact that we have 92, mostly young people, who came here to do posters. We have three poster sessions in response to the SUO fellows committee. We changed a little bit this year versus how we did it last year. We have a poster session in the morning, a poster session over lunch, and a poster session in the afternoon during the break. So please, everyone go to these posters. These are obviously the future of our field, these young people who came here to present their posters.

So I think we will go ahead and start. So I would ask Dr. Soloway to come up and to moderate the first session.

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