SLIDES & TRANSCRIPTS
Friday, December 5, 2003

Introduction/Welcome

Ian Thompson, M.D.

Slide 1:

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Slide 2:

I am Ian Thompson, and I have the great privilege of serving this year. Marston, I would like to specifically thank you for the weather that we managed to bring in. In San Antonio we don't own galoshes.

We really have been extraordinarily successful as a society and this Winter Meeting is a part of it. We owe a great deal of debt to the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health for supporting us and providing this terrific venue and especially to Marston Linehan and his staff who put in hundreds and hundreds of hours to this meeting.

This is a very, very new meeting for the organization. It was conceived under I believe Dr. Paul Shelhammer's term as president and has exploded in its success.

We have, I believe somewhere in the range of 400 to 500 registrants who are coming from all over the world and it is rapidly becoming the meeting for urologic oncology. It is really a remarkable opportunity for all of us to come together and speak on one subject. We are a multidisciplinary organization of urologists, radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, biostatisticians, epidemiologists from around the world and we continue to seek out membership.  

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Slide 3:

I think, in fact, I know many of you here in the audience are long-term members of the SUO. You come from many countries across the world and I would like to give all of you a charge, and that charge is to pick out your colleagues who are current stars in urologic oncology and that is urologic oncology and the disciplines associated with urology and the management of the patient with urologic neoplasm and tell them to go to the web site.

The web site is societyofurologiconcology.org, all run together. Somebody else owned SUO when we started. So, just go there and tell them if they click on the membership button they can join, and we do have some fairly rigid criteria and that is 75 percent of your practice has to be dealing with urologic oncology, but beyond that we really encourage our membership to expand and one of our target member groups is the membership from abroad.

We have done fairly well in the United States . There are individuals whom we continue to encourage. We have candidate memberships and fellowships and other individuals, other disciplines as well, but one of our target memberships is from outside the United States .

So, I encourage you if you have a colleague that you would like to have join the organization please have him go to our web site.

Now, I am not going to talk any more. We have a remarkable program for you today. The other thing that we have as you well know is tomorrow we have the first young urologic oncologist meeting which is going to occupy the entire afternoon and it is incredibly oversubscribed. There were 100 abstracts that were submitted to it. So, in its first year it is a remarkable success and much of the success of this winter meeting is attributable to the work of Marston Linehan who has done a phenomenal job.

Marston and Eric Klein are the co-chairs of the program for the Winter Meeting and so without further ado, Marston?

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