The existence of cellular oncogenes, first posited by Huebner and Todaro in 1969, became a reality in the mid-1970s and oncogenes emerged as a mature field in the early 1980s. The seeds of the Oncogene Meeting were planted at the Cold Spring Harbor RNA Tumor Virus Meeting where in the early 1980s the oncogenes discovered as passengers in the acutely transforming retroviruses began to take on a life of their own. By 1984, over 20 oncogenes had been discovered and it was evident that enough was known about the functions of their products to justify a meeting on oncogenes in their own right, and during the 1984 RNA Tumor Virus Meeting, George Vande Woude suggested that it was time to start a separate meeting on oncogenes. A discussion was arranged by the organizers among interested participants at the meeting, and it was decided to start a new meeting series in the tradition of CSH meetings to be called the Oncogene Meeting. George Vande Woude took the lead and arranged for the first Oncogene Meeting to be held in 1985 at Hood College, in Frederick, Maryland, close to the newly formed Frederick Cancer Research Facility Basic Research Program that he had founded and was currently directing.
Oncogenes was a buzzword in the mid-1980s but we knew little about what most of them did except that they transformed cells and caused tumors in animals. At the first meeting in 1985, each session was devoted to a small number of oncogenes, which were grouped largely based on whether they were protein kinases or nuclear or cytoplasmic oncoproteins. In the ensuing 20 years it has become clear that oncoproteins have a wide variety of functions, and the study of oncogenes has spawned many new fields of cell biology. In consequence where once it was possible for a single meeting to cover everything known about oncogenes, and attract over 500 people eager to hear the latest (with sessions having up to 14 ten min talks (!), and the poster sessions being held in shifts under two or three large tents), now the term oncogene seems to be almost passé and the 20th meeting attracted barely 200 people (Supplementary Figure 1 shows the rise and fall of abstract numbers at the meeting from 1985 to 2004). Over 20 years, the Oncogene Meeting served an enormously useful purpose, and many of those who spoke for the first time at the early meetings are now themselves leaders in the cancer field. Indeed, one could trace a number of very successful scientific lineages at the 20th Meeting. One vital feature of the Oncogene Meeting was the fact that it was for young investigators and most of the presentations were short talks given by postdoctoral fellows and graduate students selected from among those who submitted abstracts. Often this gave the individuals their first opportunity to talk at a major meeting. The promise of the cumulative discoveries in the cancer field, often first reported in short talks at the Oncogene Meeting, is now being borne out with the first approved drugs rationally targeted against oncogene products.
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