Publications
APS Bulletin • Volume 11, Number 2, March/April 2001
Special Interest Groups
David A. Williams, PhD, Department Editor
The Basic Science SIG:
Who We Are and How We Operate
Linda S. Sorkin, PhD; Linda R. Watkins, PhD
The Basic Science Special Interest Group (SIG) was formed less than a year ago. It could just as easily have been called the Preclinical SIG, although we also welcome members with interests in clinical research. Our focus centers on the mechanisms underlying pain and pain modulation with the long-term goal of understanding the neurocircuitry, neuropharmacology, and molecular biology, among other things, of pain rather than focusing directly on patient care and treatment.
The SIG is an offshoot of the Basic Science Task Force that was established by the American Pain Society (APS) Board of Directors in spring 2000. Dick Chapman, PhD, in his last APS Bulletin President’s Message (November/December 2000, p. 2), stated with regret that in the last several years, basic scientists have been taken for granted and that clinical and related economic concerns have dominated the priorities of APS. Starting with the advice of the task force and the results of a survey, Dr. Chapman initiated changes to “restore basic science to a central position in APS.” As the new president of APS, Michael Ashburn, MD MPH, has pledged to maintain the changes already in place and to continue the process of making APS more attractive to scientists involved in the mechanistic aspects of pain research. The Basic Science SIG will be an essential part of the process. Thus, our primary role may be to help APS evolve into an organization that leads the field in cutting-edge basic/preclinical research and to help the APS Annual Scientific Meeting become a first-class forum for the presentation and discussion of such work.
The most prominent feature of the SIG is our electronic mailing list; on last count it had 161 members. The electronic forum provides an instantaneous means to pose questions about pain and pain research to a knowledgable group of pain professionals (e.g., “Does anyone have a used whazzit that I can buy or borrow?). Job ads can be posted as well as news items and gripes, among other things. It also is used to solicit feedback about how best to change the annual meeting to optimize it as a forum for presenting cutting-edge basic/preclinical science. You do have to be a member of the electronic mailing list to directly e-mail the group. However, you do not have to be a member of the SIG or even of APS to be a member of the electronic mailing list. One reason for this broad approach is that the SIG electronic mailing list hopes to build a unified community of basic/preclinical pain researchers. We created the electronic mailing list to help further everyone’s work on the study of pain and hope that this approach will translate to many of these people becoming active APS members through this electronic association. If you are not on the electronic mailing list, you can join simply by e-mailing Linda Watkins at lwatkins@psych.colorado.edu. If you do not wish to be an electronic mailing list member but would like something to be sent out to the group (e.g., a job ad), the process is the same.
In addition to the electronic mailing list, the SIG will hold its first research/social meeting at the APS 20th Annual Scientific Meeting this April in Phoenix. Like the electronic mailing list, the SIG research/social meeting is a networking tool for basic/preclinical researchers. In an effort to bring the latest research to the attention of APS attendees, this year’s research/social meeting will feature a “data blitz” session. Attendees are invited to share their latest work with others in a low-key, social atmosphere. Equally important, both the electronic mailing list and research/social meeting provide the means by which basic and preclinical scientists can find our voice and make our needs known. The electronic mailing list and research/social meeting provide avenues for polling the membership for suggested topics, areas of interest, and willingness to participate in symposia and short courses to be presented prior to the meeting on the professional development course day.
What we find valuable about APS
If you polled the SIG membership, you would find that we all have our own lists of what we each find of value about APS. At the top of many such lists, though, is the vision of John Bonica, MD, who believed that by communicating with one another and working as a multidisciplinary team, we could best treat or develop treatments for the patient in pain. Researchers are an integral part of that team. Learning more about the clinically relevant problems, knowing the differences between our animal models and the human conditions (e.g., what works in one but not the other) are essential parts of this process. Developing an ongoing dialogue through which we really talk with one another will help to better direct our research toward clinical relevance as well as teach us new aspects of our fields. This is our opportunity to speak with scientists and clinicians with vastly different techniques, experiences, and resources from our own. Discussing common problems in this atmosphere may provide synergy and facilitate new approaches from outside of the box.
During the APS Annual Scientific Meeting we also have the unique opportunity to meet in a smaller, more conducive atmosphere than at the annual Society for Neurosciences meeting. The APS meeting could develop to provide networking at its finest. Poster sessions are small enough to allow attendees to not only see everything on their lists, but also talk to all of the presenters. Beginning this year, the annual meeting will include dedicated poster viewing time and organized discussion of posters. This is an invaluable service for all of us, but especially for postdoctorals and students. Trainee members of the society can interact with a plethora of senior scientists with common interests who can take the time to talk with them about their work and their futures and perhaps give them new insights.
The best public example of interaction and synergy at the Atlanta meeting occurred at the Basic Science Research Forum dinner that was organized by Jeffrey Mogil, PhD. Jeff deliberately chose a debatable topic, the relative role of lamina I and V cells in pain transmission, that, within our community, is a topic of much contention. People argued, some quite heatedly. True advocates didn’t change their views on the superior influence of their cell type over the other, but the rest of us listened and threw in our comments. Some of these comments were from clinician-scientists such as Jim Campbell, MD, and Ken Casey, MD. Ken provided information from a case report on a stroke patient published in Annals of Neurology, a paper that very few of us had read, that seemed to challenge some of the laboratory results. Necessity of exposure to different literatures, knowledge that many opinions are controversial, as well as the key fact that important literature can predate the earliest Medline listing in the mid-1960s were all illustrated. These are invaluable lessons for our trainees that can best be learned in this type of forum. Although the dinner/forum is an official APS function and not for SIG members only, it has been structured to appeal to our interest group. Through the electronic mailing list and the SIG meeting we have the opportunity to help construct upcoming discussions.
SIG meeting on Saturday
The last (and as yet untested) element of the SIG will be the Saturday evening research/social meeting to be held after the last symposium slot. We will be trying a “data blitz” format where everyone who would like to participate has a maximum of 5 to 6 minutes to chat, using no more than five slides (or transparencies if it is really hot off the bench) to answer the questions, “What have you been doing lately?” and “What are you excited about today?” We are hoping for new basic/preclinical or even clinical data, by no means having to be anywhere near a complete story. Puzzling data you want feedback or suggestions on are great, too! The goal of the data blitz is to share the very latest data and stimulate discussion. This appetite-stimulating social event is scheduled to last for an hour, so this gives us time for about 10 labs to present before we break up to go to dinner. We also may take just a few minutes to solicit feedback on the 2001 APS meeting to guide the 2002 Scientific Program Committee as well as to solicit a volunteer(s) to take over as chair(s) of the SIG for the following year.
Linda Sorkin is a professor in the department of anesthesiology at the University of California at San Diego.
Linda Watkins is a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Colorado in Boulder.