Letter to Our ISCB Members & Colleagues

The 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Albert Einstein for discovering the law of photoelectric effect. Over the course of his illustrious career, Einstein made such a name for himself that his surname is synonymous with "genius" in today's vernacular. But he can also be credited as a whimsical philosopher, with statements such as, "People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results." Obviously, a scientist is not motivated in the same way as a woodchopper, and the pursuit of science is not for everybody. In fact, if immediacy were our inspiration, no doubt our classrooms would be sparsely visited and our labs would be devoid of researchers.

But that is not the case at all. Over a period of time we steadily chip away at our research pursuits, enjoying the fruits of our labors a bit at a time, and regularly reaffirming our love of science. Securing sustainable funding and publishing high impact papers are constant challenges to achieving the goals we set for ourselves, but we generally do see the results of our efforts, even if not immediately so.

Running ISCB is no different in that regard. Some initiatives take hold like fast growing seeds, but more often than not they take time to develop, grow, and eventually bear fruit. In this newsletter, we are pleased to present you with a collection of some of ISCB's most important and prominent initiatives, most of which were originated long ago, and have only in the last year produced the intended results.

We are particularly proud to publish the ISCB Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature, which is the result of a multi-year effort led by Richard Lathrop as head of ISCB's Public Affairs & Policies Committee. We are also pleased to introduce our two annual award winners (Ashburner and Tryoyanskaya), as well as our esteemed class of ISCB Fellows for 2011 (page 7). These awardees and Fellows have collectively produced an impressive body of work that has earned them high honors from their ISCB peers.

Throughout this newsletter you will find announcements of ISCB meetings taking place around the globe. Expanding our regional meetings portfolio has required a worldwide collaborative effort, and we are proud to be offering meetings on four continents in the span of less than one year. An announcement on the collaboration between ISCB and EMBnet furthers our mutual commitment to providing education and training through these meetings, while an appeal to contribute to Wikipedia as a means of communicating the significance of computational biology to the world-at-large is just the beginning of a newly adopted initiative, but one that clearly shows immediate results with each new edit.

To be commended are the members of the Student Council, who each year seem to build upon the previous year's team in organizing exceptional events during ISMB and throughout the year that directly benefit the student community they serve.

In addition to what is reported in the limited pages of this newsletter, ISCB achieved a membership milestone at the end of 2010 by surpassing 3000 members for the first time. As Society revenues come primarily from a combination of membership dues and conference proceeds, our strong membership, financially successful meetings in 2010 and early 2011, and carefully controlled expenses are succeeding in stabilizing our financial standing. We believe ISCB's long pursuit of financial security is finally within view as we continue to build up reserves to help weather any economic uncertainties that may lie ahead. We are not fully there yet, but we are much closer than just a few short years ago.

As many of you are reading this at the ISMB/ECCB 2011 conference in Vienna, Austria, we offer sincere congratulations to our sister conference, ECCB, on its 10 Year Anniversary. ISCB's partnership with ECCB in jointly organizing this meeting every other year when ISMB is in Europe has been an enriching experience for all involved, and we are committed to strengthening our partnership through their 20th, 30th, 40th.... well, you get the picture.

Speaking of 20th anniversaries, we will be excited to celebrate 20 years of ISMB next year in Long Beach, California (near Los Angeles), July 15-17, 2012. At the first ISMB in 1993 we're sure the organizers knew they were starting something long lasting and impactful. Now that nearly 20 years have flown by, perhaps they feel a bit like they were chopping wood after all. Immediacy is, on balance, relative. It seems Einstein had something to say about relativity as well...

All the best,

Burkhard Rost, Ph.D., Chair and President

Terry Gaasterland, Vice President

Janet Kelso, Vice President

Thomas Lengauer, Vice President

Michal Linial, Vice President

Reinhard Schneider, Treasurer

Scott Markel, Secretary

BJ Morrison McKay, Executive Officer