SRNT Newsletter

Aug/Sept 2005, Volume 11, Number 3

President's Column

by David Balfour

This is a quiet time of the year, the calm before the storm of activity that precedes the annual conference and board meeting in February. Normally, at this time, the European members of the Society would be looking forward to their annual meeting in September or October. This year, of course, SRNT Europe set aside their meeting in order to maximize attendance in Prague. In my last column, I commented on the enthusiasm with which American members of the Society spoke about the joint meeting. Since writing that column, I have received more feedback from the European membership. They too were delighted that the meeting had come to Europe and had been successful. They felt it gave the Europeans a chance to showcase the work on nicotine and tobacco on this side of the Atlantic. However, I also detected a more subtle positive outcome. Relatively few European members are able to attend the annual meeting in the United States, and many of those who went to Prague were experiencing the annual meeting for the first time. They were impressed. As a result, I know that a more members of the Society in Europe, and elsewhere, will try to get to the US meetings. However, we must not be overly optimistic on this score because, as many members found, attending meetings on the other side of the Atlantic is not the cheapest of activities! Nevertheless, when reviewing grants in the UK on nicotine-related work, I am finding increasingly that applicants include specific requests for funds to attend the annual meeting of SRNT, a sure sign that it is now seen as an important venue for nicotine and tobacco researchers to present their work.

Although things are quiet at this time of the year, we are by no means totally inactive. Suzanne Colby, Eric Donny, and Jen Tidey have already begun to work on the plans for our meeting next February. I think the program committee is in place, or almost there, and thoughts are beginning to turn to the program itself. Work is also progressing on the revision of the Society's bylaws. The Society was 10 years old in 2004, and the Board felt that the bylaws, which were written at the time of its inception, contained some provisions that were out of date and may actually hamper some of the activities that the Society might want to undertake in the new century. It was decided, therefore, that a small committee composed initially of the President (Ken Warner), the immediate Past-President (Nancy Rigotti) and myself (as President-Elect at the time) should look at the bylaws and come forward with some revisions. Under Ken's guidance, much of this work was done, and we met long into one evening in Prague to discuss the revised package of bylaws. Since the meeting in Prague, we have recruited the new President-Elect, Ellen Gritz, to the group, and we have a draft of the new bylaws to work on. The membership will, in due course, have the opportunity to see and comment on the changes we propose. I think it is important to emphasize that it is not our intention to change in any way the aims or focus of the Society. They will remain as they were when our Founding Fathers first proposed the Society. However, we have spotted some significant anomalies and issues that do need to be addressed if the Society is to function efficiently and effectively. We will make these changes clear when we come forward with the draft of the revised bylaws. However, for now I thought I might just highlight two of the issues that have begun to exercise us.

The council and committee structure of the Society is fairly complex. The structure was based upon that used by the College on Problems of Drug Dependence. It has served us well in the past. However, the Four Presidents Group (as we have become known) now believe this structure needs to be updated and simplified. Clearly, much of the work that these councils and committees do remains central to the Society's activities and will continue to be needed. However, as the Society has evolved, I think the structure does not serve us as well as it might, and there is some overlap in the remits of some of committees and councils. Our hope and plan is that we will define the commitments and remit of each committee more clearly and, perhaps, more logically. As a result, the members of each committee will understand clearly what they have volunteered, or been volunteered, to do.

The decision to review this aspect of our structure has some immediate consequences. Firstly, it means that some of the current members of SRNT committees and councils who should have rotated off in the last year have been asked to stay in post until the new structure is agreed upon. I am very grateful to those of you who have agreed to spend extra time in post. Furthermore, at the last full board meeting in Prague, it was agreed that we should encourage new younger members of the Society to take more part in its organization and governance by volunteering to serve on committees and to stand for election for posts in the Society. Encouragingly, several of the new generation of the membership have contacted me since I became President to ask how they can become more involved. Well, now is the time. With the new structure, we will be looking to include in the revitalized committees members who are new to committee work in SRNT, and, for those of you have already contacted me, you are already on the list of people I will encourage to become involved. Hopefully, this will bring some new thinking to the way we do things. But it needs to spread wider than this, and I would encourage all of the younger members to think about "stepping up to the plate." I realize that for many, this will come at a time when they are starting out on their careers, and they need to be writing grant proposals and papers. However, the future for research on nicotine and tobacco does not just lie in the laboratory. It is important that we "greybeards" do not exert too great an influence on the future directions that tobacco research follows.

Looking to the future, a second issue that we would like to address and clarify relates to the relationships between SRNT and it foreign "affiliates." The formation of the European "chapter" of the Society has shown that more local groupings of this type can generate successful meetings and other activities. I feel that the European experience has been a successful test-bed for this approach which is beginning to influence the ways in which we might seek to extend our outreach to other parts of the world. One outcome that you may have already noticed is that the membership from Europe and the Rest of the World are now each represented specifically by Member Delegates on the Board. At our Board meeting, Marina Picciotto reminded us that the North American membership did not have such guaranteed representation and, in theory at least, no member delegate has to come from the US or Canada. Of course it is very unlikely that this would happen _ but we have all heard of Murphy's law. So there are moves afoot to restructure the Executive Committee and Board a little to ensure that it is representative of the membership and to leave open, in a defined way, the mechanisms for extending representation on the Board to members of the Society in other regions of the world should it become appropriate to do so.