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Banbury Center
From time to time, Banbury Center holds a meeting on what might be called "science policy," i. e.,
discussions of topics that affect the way biomedical research is done. One of the most interesting,
held in 2001, was on the ways in which the Internet is making, and provoking, changes in the dissemination
of scientific information and data. Electronic Access to the Scientific Literature examined
the initiatives intended to lower the barriers to electronic access to the scientific literature, for
example, by providing free access to the full collection of scientific papers within a short period of
publication. This is a highly controversial topic, and although no resolution was reached at the
meeting, the discussions involving scientists, publishers of society journals, and commercial publishers
were useful.
Cancer figured strongly in the Banbury Center program in 2001, with four meetings dealing with
important issues in cancer treatment. Two discussed the current status of interferon therapy in
cancer and were particularly interesting in that they reviewed the actions of interferon in virus infections
as well as in multiple sclerosis. The third meeting on New Concepts for Clinical Cancer Trials
discussed new findings indicating that the manner in which cancer treatments are given is important.
It seems that different dosing schedules combined with lower doses could increase the efficacy
and reduce the toxicity and side effects of traditional cytotoxic drugs, and perhaps also of
radiotherapy and some investigational drugs. These topics were so interesting that we decided to
make Controlling Cancer the subject of the 2001 Executives Conference. It was a great success,
and we are very grateful to David Deming and JPMorgan H&Q for their continuing support of the
meeting.
We turned to a neuroscience topic with strong psychological and philosophical underpinnings
with Can A Machine Be Conscious? A wealth of new experimental information about the brain has
been gathered by neuroscientists, and participants discussed how these data require a revision of
classic thinking on consciousness. The participants were a most interesting mix, from philosophers
and neuroscientists, to builders of robots, to robots themselves!
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