This year's Research Festival will begin Tuesday, Oct. 14 with a symposium titled "The Past, Present, and Future of Clinical Research," from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Masur Auditorium, Bldg. 10.

Speakers for the session, who will trace progress in major clinical realms, are the people who were involved in that progress in the last century and continue to carry on into this one.

All former and current NIH investigators, the speakers are — in order of appearance — Drs. Vincent DeVita, Tom Waldmann, Steve Rosenberg, Eugene Braunwald, Elizabeth Nabel, Steve Paul, Henry McFarland, French Anderson, Allen Spiegel, Elizabeth Neufeld, Francis Collins, Harvey Alter, Anthony Fauci and John Gallin.

The subject matter spans cancer therapeutics, cardiovascular disease, neuroscience, the molecular basis of disease and infectious diseases.

The Research Festival runs from the 14th through the 17th. Music and food will refresh festival goers as they immerse themselves in the scientific offerings of 12 minisymposia and hundreds of posters. There will also be exhibits of intramural resources and commercial vendors, plus a Job Fair for postdocs and clinical fellows.

The minisymposia sessions — 10:30 a.m. to noon and 2 to 3:30 p.m. — will be held Wednesday, Oct. 15, at Natcher Conference Center.

The six simultaneous morning symposia are on host response to infectious diseases, molecular epidemiology of chronic diseases, protein-protein interactions, virus entry-virus receptor interactions, programmed cell death, and interconnection of hormones, bone and brain.

The afternoon symposia address genome instability, bioinformatics, negative regulation of immune responses, bringing genetics to the public, macromolecular complexes and assemblies, and interfacing the physical and biological sciences.

This year's festival is cochaired by Dr. Joseph Fraumeni, director of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, NCI, and Dr. Robert Desimone, NIMH scientific director.

For more information visit http://festival03.nih.gov.