The Birth of the American Society of Gene Therapy
Authors: George Stamatoyannopoulos
Journal: Molecular Therapy (2010)

In the spring of 1996, the field of human gene therapy was flying high. Many pioneering developments were receiving high exposure in the lay press. Several gene therapy biotechnology companies were operating, and new ones were being formed. Major pharmaceutical companies had established gene therapy initiatives. Medical schools were rushing to establish gene therapy programs. Conferences on human gene therapy were being organized, and well-established gene therapy investigators were filling the programs. Yet there was not a major forum in which all the gene therapy investigators—established and new, young and old—would gather each year, and where the young investigators, the postdoctoral fellows, and the graduate students would have the opportunity to present their work. I thought that we needed to establish this forum. I thought that the field needed an American society of gene therapy. I discussed this idea first with my colleagues in Seattle. Dusty Miller, Mark Kay, David Russell, Hans-Peter Kiem, and Tony Blau were the leaders in our gene therapy program and had several postdocs and students in their laboratories. Their response was enthusiastic. I was encouraged, and started talking with the leaders of the field across the country. The response was mixed. A few leaders were rather negative or reserved; their common comment was “Why do we need another gene therapy meeting? We have the Keystone meeting and many others.” The majority, however, were supportive. Richard Mulligan summarized it concisely: “Long overdue!” From the beginning, I envisioned the American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) as a major scientific society that would cover the entire landscape of gene therapy and would be the magnet for physicians and scientists—in particular, the younger gene therapy investigators. Such a society would have an annual meeting that would be the principal scientific event for gene therapists all over the world. It is easy to dream about starting a new scientific society with such ambitious goals, but achieving these goals is another matter. Over the preceding decade, territories and coalitions had evolved, and it was inevitable that the new society would compete with established interests. Despite these reservations, I plunged into this project with great enthusiasm, and in the summer of 1996 I started the process of incorporation of the ASGT. I learned that to do so I needed to have a board of directors. In addition to me, the founders of the ASGT who signed the articles of incorporation were Richard Mulligan, Y.W. Kan, Arthur Nienhuis, French Anderson, Inder Verma, Dusty Miller, Mark Kay, Savio Woo, and James Wilson. The Articles of Incorporation were filed 19 July 1996. The first Board of Directors of the ASGT was completed with the addition of Joe Glorioso as acting treasurer and David Bodine as acting secretary. The next step was to write the bylaws of the Society, which I did with the help of Art Nienhuis and David Bodine, borrowing heavily on the bylaws of the American Society of Hematology (ASH), of which I had been a past president. The first meeting of the Board of Directors took place in San Francisco on 29 October 1996. Because the Society had no money, all the participants paid their own travel expenses. The board approved the bylaws with minor modifications and elected the first officers of the Society: Stamatoyannopoulos as president, Wilson as president-elect, Bodine as secretary, and Glorioso as treasurer. Elizabeth Nabel was unanimously elected to the board to replace the seat vacated by Wilson when he became president-elect. Several other issues were deliberated and decided during this first meeting. One was the establishment of regular, corresponding, and associate memberships, the last category for fellows and students (with very low membership fees). Another decision was, against my recommendation, not to pursue the creation of an entirely new journal. Instead, it was decided that the ASGT would adopt one of the existing journals as the official journal, and a subcommittee (Stamatoyannopoulos, Anderson, Glorioso) was formed to proceed with negotiations with the publishers of the two existing gene therapy journals: Gene Therapy and Human Gene Therapy. Seattle was chosen as the site of the first annual meeting of the Society, and the second weekend of May 1998 was set as the target date of the meeting. My task was now to make the ASGT the major society that I had envisioned. The presence in the Board of Directors of several distinguished members of the gene therapy community gave legitimacy to the new Society. Now we needed to involve as many more big names as possible in addition to opening the doors to recognition of young investigators. This was done by organizing several standing committees (e.g., membership, program, education, etc.). We also needed to have as much support as possible from gene therapists outside the United States. We formed the Canadian Council of the ASGT and the Council of Corresponding Members, the latter to represent the gene therapists from European and Asiatic countries. Members of both councils were instrumental in the success of ASGT and our first annual meeting. Another opportunity for involving many investigators in the affairs of the ASGT was provided with the establishment of several scientific committees. Most scientific societies include in their annual meetings scientific symposia or workshops. Usually these are organized by a program committee or by individuals delegated to do so by the president of the society. During my years as an officer and board member at the ASH I became very impressed with the system of scientific subcommittees that put together the scientific symposia programs. This system was established at the ASH about 50 years ago as a result of an upheaval by the younger, mostly experimental hematologists, who did not accept the overwhelming patronage of the old guard of clinical hematologists. I was convinced that multiple scientific committees would provide a superior mechanism for organizing the scientific symposia and workshops of the annual meeting of ASGT. Many gene therapists were invited to join the scientific committees, thus increasing the critical mass of members involved in the Society's affairs. Although we had no money, I started working on the first meeting. Because I was hopeful that the Seattle meeting would attract more than 2,000 participants, I decided to book the Washington Convention Center. I visited the facility several times and reserved almost all the available space. After I had signed the contract, I had jitters: What if the meeting was a bust and only a couple of hundred people show? How would we fill all these rooms? How would I find the money to pay the convention center? How would we attract good speakers without money? It might be a pending disaster. The secret for a successful scientific meeting is to have many very good speakers. Even if a few do not deliver, they will not impact the meeting, because the attendees will remember the rest. Starting in the spring of 1997, each scientific committee was asked to propose at least two symposia and workshops with the best scientists as speakers. This process took a few months to complete, but by the end of summer 1997 all committees had delivered excellent symposia, which were formulated mostly following deliberations among the committee members (although some chairpersons acted less democratically). The program was outstanding, but I knew that it would be very expensive. How could a society with empty coffers implement this program? Gene therapy had received some bruises in previous years. There had been a rush for clinical trials, several times without extensive scientific documentation, and there had been promises of miracles. A report, commissioned by the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and released in December 1995, was quite critical. At least among certain basic scientists, gene therapy started to be considered scientifically soft. One of our goals was to use the ASGT to correct this image of gene therapy and stress the scientific accomplishments of the field. I discussed this idea with leaders of several NIH institutes. I thought that one way to stress the importance of the science of gene therapy was to have the NIH itself support the symposia and workshops organized by the Society's scientific committees. Several Institute directors offered their support. Claude Lenfant, then director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, decided to support three symposia organized by the committees on cardiovascular gene therapy, hemopoietic stem cell gene therapy, and gene therapy of cystic fibrosis and pulmonary disease. Richard Klausner, then director of the National Cancer Institute, supported two symposia organized by the committee on cancer gene therapy. Francis Collins, then director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, supported four symposia: one organized by the committee on gene therapy of genetic diseases and three by the committee on nonviral gene therapy. Senior program officers David Badman and Cathy McKeon of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases convinced their institute to support two symposia. In the end, all the symposia were supported by NIH Institutes! We thus achieved two goals: to receive for our scientific program the stamp of approval of the NIH and to solve the problem of funding these symposia. In retrospect, this generous support by the NIH Institutes was critical for the success of our first annual meeting in Seattle. When the scientific program of our symposia was finalized, we produced a very attractive announcement of our first annual meeting, built around our scientific symposia, highlighting the support of each symposium by an Institute of the NIH. Young investigators, postdocs, and students are the lifeblood of every scientific society. Therefore, when I was thinking in the spring of 1996 about putting together the ASGT, one of the items foremost in my mind was how the Society would attract these individuals aside from merely providing a forum for presentation of their work. My question was why a postdoc or a student would attend the meeting of the ASGT instead of the meeting of another scientific or medical society. Several medical societies had already introduced gene therapy in their programs. For example, the ASH was offering gene therapy symposia and had sessions of oral presentations and poster presentations dedicated to gene therapy. Why, then, would a hematologist gene therapist attend the ASGT meeting if gene therapy was already included in the annual meeting of the ASH? It became obvious to me that the ASGT should have a distinguishing feature relative to all other societies: an outstanding educational program on gene therapy science and technology. This concept was adopted by the board and enthusiastically pursued by Savio Woo and Jim Wilson. Savio undertook the responsibility of organizing the educational program of the Seattle meeting. I remember visiting his department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and deliberating the goals and the philosophy of the ASGT educational program. We decided that the program should be very didactic and should address the basics of gene therapy. The result was a program consisting of 16 sessions with three speakers each. A prominent feature was the “ABCs of gene therapy” (the ABCs of retroviral gene therapy, of adenoviral gene therapy, etc.). But who would pay for the education program? Jim Wilson appealed to Bill Kelley, then dean of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, who gave the ASGT a check for $25,000! Savio secured $5,000 from his dean and Joe Glorioso secured another $5,000, from the dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (the University of Washington (UW) dean politely refused to give us the $5,000 I had requested). In any case, with $35,000 in hand, we had the funds with which to implement our educational program. I do not recall exactly how the idea came about to organize a high school student–teacher gene therapy meeting in the context of the ASGT meeting. Beverly Storb (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), Seattle) enthusiastically took the responsibility for organizing it. We got the word out to the science teachers of western Washington high schools, who in turn recruited a specified number of students from each school. The faculty for that meeting, recruited from scientists at UW and FHCRC, organized five sessions (experiences) for the students. But again money became a problem—the students needed to be fed breakfast and lunch, substitute teachers needed to be paid, and buses were required to bring students from the various districts to the convention center. Harold Varmus, then director of the NIH, came to the rescue, and his office covered all the expenses! Needless to say, this unique activity of the ASGT received considerable media exposure. Thus, by the end of the summer of 1997 we had done quite a bit of background work for the first annual meeting of our Society in Seattle the following year. The looming question on everyone's mind was whether we would have an audience. Membership was climbing very slowly. One of my associates produced during his spare time an ASGT website, and every morning I eagerly counted the hits. Unfortunately, the numbers were climbing very slowly. I was alarmed! It became obvious that we needed to use aggressive measures to advertise the Society and the Seattle meeting. One approach we took was to advertise the ASGT and the Seattle meeting through other societies’ meetings. We printed, I recall, several thousand copies of the ASGT meeting announcement, and whenever I learned that one of the board members or another friend was going to a gene therapy–related meeting, I assembled a packet of announcements to be distributed by placing them in the seats of the participants. I remember that David Bodine and I went from room to room at the December 1997 ASH meeting and put the ASGT announcement on each seat. We probably distributed well over a thousand announcements at that meeting. The second approach was to mobilize gene therapists overseas. Shigetaka Asano (The Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo) and Yoshikatsu Eto (Tokyo Jikei University School of Medicine) were crucial supporters of the ASGT in Japan. Along with their colleagues in the leadership of the Japanese Society of Gene Therapy, they distributed our announcements to all their members. The help of Odile Haggenauer (HÔpital Saint-Louis, Paris) was critical for spreading the news in Europe about the ASGT and the Seattle meeting. I also bombarded all my friends in Europe and Asia with e-mails, faxes, and mailings of the announcement; Jim Wilson did the same. Another approach occurred to me: why not use the membership rosters of other scientific societies? No such lists existed on the Internet in 1997, but friends provided me with the membership lists of a dozen medical societies that I thought might have members with an interest in gene therapy. I went over each society's membership list, marking the names of persons I thought we should contact, and they all received the announcement of the meeting and my letter inviting them to join the ASGT. Additionally, I prepared a list with e-mail addresses of chief executive officers and chief scientific officers of several biotechnology companies, and every week I e-mailed them the announcement of the Seattle meeting. In parallel, Jim Wilson and I were asking the members of the ASGT standing and scientific committees—we had more than 100 such members—to spread the message of the ASGT and recruit members among their students and associates (and several did). All these activities took a big toll on our time. In the second half of 1997 and the months in 1998 leading up to the meeting, I was devoting four to six hours per day to the ASGT. But I was enjoying it tremendously. From the Society's inception until mid-1997, the administrative work was handled through my office. I had an extremely efficient secretary, Sherri Brenner, who very competently and enthusiastically supported my efforts and contributed extra time. Although I could manage the Society from my office while the organization was still small, I knew from my experience with the ASH that such management would eventually become very demanding. We therefore needed a management team to help with ASGT affairs. We contacted several contract management organizations, but our demands were unusual—we wanted to find a company that would not charge the ASGT until the Society could afford the expense. Two of the organizations I had worked with when I was on the board of the ASH agreed to these terms, and the one I selected assigned as ASGT manager Margaret Stallings, a very talented and enthusiastic individual I knew from my years with the ASH. She was in place by the time we distributed the call for abstracts for the meeting. The deadline for the abstracts was 2 March 1998. The day of the deadline I was extremely nervous and constantly called Margaret for updates on the number of abstracts arriving at her office. The final count was 761! My dream was that the ASGT would become the main forum for all the gene therapists around the world. This dream was becoming a reality, judging by the large number of abstracts submitted by overseas investigators. We were delirious! David Bodine very competently organized the review of the abstracts, and the program committee met in Philadelphia to put together the program of the plenary, oral, and poster sessions. I carefully reviewed each oral presentation session. From my experience with other societies, I knew that there is sometimes a subtle discrimination against abstracts from overseas, as shown by the differing frequencies of such abstracts among the oral and poster presentations. I did not want this to happen to the ASGT. With the abstract-scoring system used by us and most other societies, in each abstract category there are typically a few abstracts that take the top scores and are definitely selected for oral presentation, whereas the majority fall into a lower rank and will definitely not be presented in the oral session. However, a considerable number of abstracts fall into the “gray zone.” In my opinion, given the subjectivity of reviewers, there is not much difference between an abstract that receives a score of 3.0 and one with a score of 4.0. I reviewed all the abstracts of all the sessions with an eye on the gray zone. After this review, many abstracts from overseas that had originally been assigned to the poster sessions found their way to the oral-presentation program. In the end, almost all the oral-presentation sessions had at least one talk by an overseas investigator. The ASGT was thus becoming an international society. In preparation for the Seattle meeting, I took care of every detail, including the seating arrangements in the rooms, the placement of the podium and the screens, tests of the audiovisual equipment, the size of the rooms assigned to each session, and even the position of the tables with the coffee and condiments for the coffee breaks. As the day of the meeting approached, my nervousness increased. The morning of the first day of the meeting, I went early to the convention center, moving around from room to room to be sure that everything was in order. The first day was allocated to the educational program, and I was anxious to see how well the program would be attended. People started coming slowly, but soon a flood of people was streaming up the escalators of the convention center to the third floor. The rooms started filling; in a short time several rooms had standing room only. I ran into Jim Wilson in the corridor. “We made it,” he said.