25 Years of ISBER: A Personal Perspective

ISBER would like to present the following ISBER Biopreseveration and Biobanking article on, 25 Years of ISBER: A Personal Perspective, by Past ISBER President, Jim Vaught. 

During several meetings in 1999, a group of founding members of ISBER held meetings in several locations in the Washington DC area, including at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and area biobanks. The meeting that led to the naming of the society was held at the American Type Culture Collection in Manassas, Virginia. Thanks to Phil Baird and Frank Simione for hosting this seminal meeting. A variety of potential names and acronyms were proposed, many centered on the concept of freezing. The final choice, the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories, ISBER, came from ideas from several participants, including Elaine Gunter, who became our first president. Including “international” in the name reflected the group’s knowledge that advances in biorepository science and operations had become a global enterprise. Note that repository or biorepository were the most widely used terms in the U.S. at the time, “biobank” becoming more prominent several years later.

For the first 5 years of its existence, ISBER did not implement the international aspect of its name. Our first meeting using the ISBER name was in 2000 in Rockville, Maryland and was a meeting jointly sponsored by the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and ISBER. Over 200 speakers and attendees were present for the one-day conference, and a small contingent of commercial exhibits was displayed, the beginning of a long history that has led to the large and very professional exhibits we have now seen for many years. Other early meetings then ensued, in Atlanta in 2001, which included a tour of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) biorepository, which started another recurring theme—including “field trips” to local biorepositories and specimen processing laboratories. Other early meetings (not necessarily in chronological order) were in Bethesda, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Seattle, Washington; Boston, Massachusetts; Orlando, Florida; and New York City. The latter meeting was held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, with the commercial exhibits staged among the museum exhibits...


Please click the following link to view the article:
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/bio.2024.0127