In 2005, ASCO celebrates the 40th anniversary of its first scientific meeting, which was held in April 1965. While the roughly 70 attendees of that event could not have known it, that small gathering would eventually go on to take the form of the contemporary Annual Meeting, the premier educational event in oncology. The following article chronicles the founding members’ efforts to organize the meeting.

From the outset, ASCO’s founders regarded the creation of a scientific meeting in support of the Society’s clinically oriented mission as an indispensable component of the future success and vitality of the young organization.

In a letter dated April 20, 1964, one year before the Society was officially incorporated, Arnoldus Goudsmit, MD, PhD, identified the “development of a comprehensive system of information about drugs and their application to [the] treatment of cancer … [and] the methodology of gathering such information and its communication,” as a top priority for the founders as they thought about “the scientific programming of A[S]CO, including the programming for its annual meetings.”

Later that year, in one of his first communications as President, Harry Bisel, MD, recommended that, “One full day…be held annually for scientific meetings,” but there was still some debate about the precise form such meetings should take, as well as whether they should be held in conjunction with those of other cancer-related organizations or hosted independently by ASCO. Dr. Goudsmit again outlined the young Society’s options as the founders undertook to plan the first scientific meeting: “Should we meet at, on, or about the same time and place of the AMA’s annual or clinical meeting; at the American Cancer Society’s clinical meeting; at the AACR’s annual meeting; at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting … or should we go out of our way to meet independently in terms of time and place and possibly start a tradition all our own?”

Undaunted by the oft-expressed opinion that there was already an overabundance of meetings on the subject of oncology (in one memorable letter from a physician declining membership in ASCO, the writer asked, “Will you forgive me for not joining? I am allergic to medical meetings.”), Dr. Bisel selected five founding members to form a Program Committee to develop the program for ASCO’s first Annual Meeting. In January 1965, George Hyman, MD, Henry Kaplan, MD, B. J. Kennedy, MD, and Michael Shimkin, MD, led by Chair Emil Frei, MD, initiated the planning process for the Meeting, which was tentatively scheduled for April of the same year.

Though determined, this small group faced considerable challenges as they set about the task of generating interest in a clinically focused scientific meeting. As James O. Armitage, MD, 1996-1997 ASCO President, reflected in his Presidential Address, “At that time, it was difficult to get a paper accepted for presentation at any meeting if it dealt with clinical cancer therapeutics.” In addition to the widespread philosophic resistance members of the first Program Committee had to overcome, they also faced the logistic obstacle of securing meeting space in a very limited time and with very few organizational resources.

To offset these limitations, the Program Committee appealed to the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) for assistance, a course of action recommended to them by Michael J. Brennan, MD, ASCO’s second President. In a letter to Dr. Shimkin dated December 11, 1964, Dr. Brennan suggested that, “The best way to handle our meetings is to integrate them with the AACR meetings … This seems to me to be the ideal solution, not only because we have practical problems with respect to setting up a meeting this year but because … even if we had all the time in the world and all the resources … I doubt whether we could do better than to take this course of action during the initial years of the organization’s existence.”

The timing of Dr. Brennan’s suggestion was fortuitous, as the next annual meeting of the AACR was scheduled for April 7-11, 1965. With the help of Dr. Kaplan, who also served on the Program Committee for the AACR, Dr. Frei was able to determine that no AACR scientific sessions or special lectures were scheduled for the evening of Friday, April 9; thus the decision was made to hold the inaugural scientific meeting of ASCO in conjunction with the AACR conference.

With the location confirmed, the members of the Program Committee next directed their attention to the selection of scientific abstracts for presentation at the meeting. In this endeavor, the Committee again turned to the AACR for guidance. In a letter to Dr. Frei dated January 14, 1965, Dr. Kaplan noted that while “it would not really be appropriate to turn [the AACR’s] ‘reject’ abstracts over to your Program Committee for consideration for your meeting … the only practical consideration I can make is that your Program Committee … might consider writing to that group of investigators indicating that papers available for presentation but which are not to be presented at the AACR meeting would be considered by your committee for the ASCO meeting.”

The Program Committee accepted this suggestion and solicited abstracts from three contemporary experts in the fields of leukemia and multiple myeloma, each with a focus on emerging treatment strategies and clinical approaches to these diseases. The one-and-a-half hour program for the inaugural scientific meeting featured presentations by Daniel Bergsagel, MD, of the Ontario Cancer Institute; Paul B. Carbone, MD, of the National Cancer Institute; and Charles M. Huguley, MD, of the Emory University School of Medicine.

As Dr. Armitage later pointed out in his 1997 Presidential Address, “This meeting was a far cry from the giant undertaking of today,” but both the small size of the scientific program and the decision to schedule it during the AACR meeting were viewed as strategic advantages by the ASCO leadership. Dr. Brennan believed that “these first years of [ASCO’s] growth … should be ones in which it enjoys some protection and assistance from the parent society out of which … it has grown.” Holding the first Annual Meeting in conjunction with that of the AACR, he continued, “would not over strain the resources of the group either intellectually or financially and would give opportunity for a gradual evolution to forms which we may not as yet be able to fully foresee or describe.”