Membrane trafficking and the cytoskeleton: an integrated view. ASCB/EMBO/Dudley Wright Summer Research Conference, Santa Maria Imbaro, Italy, June 26-30, 1999.

The beautiful grounds, facilities and location of the Consorzio Mario Negri Sud in Santa Maria Imbaro, on the Adriatic Coast of Italy, were the site at the end of June for a stimulating, interdisciplinary meeting entitled ‘Membrane trafficking and the cytoskeleton: an integrated view’. This meeting represented the fifth and final offering of biannual summer research conferences held this decade, arranged and supported jointly by the European Molecular Biology Organization, the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and the H.Dudley Wright Foundation of Switzerland. Daniela Corda and Alberto Luini of the Department of Cell Biology and Oncology of the Consorzio hosted the meeting, supported by the excellent administrative assistance of Raffaella Bertazzi and Dorothy Doyle. The meeting topic was conceived and the sessions were organized by George Bloom (University of Texas Southwest Medical Center, Dallas, TX), Viki Allen (University of Manchester, Manchester, UK), Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz [National Institutes of Health (NIH) Division of Child Health and Human Development] and the late Thomas Kreis (University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland) who lost his life in the SwissAir crash last year. The meeting was attended by ~175 principal investigators, postdoctoral and graduate students representing 14 European countries plus the USA, Canada, Japan, Israel and New Zealand. Additional funding for the meeting was provided by the National Cancer Institute of the NIH, the National Science Foundation and the Keith Porter Foundation. The purpose of these topic-oriented summer research conferences, as envisioned by the late Mr Dudley Wright, is to foster scientific exchange between various groups of scientists isolated from each other by geographical constraints, or differences in fields or approaches to a problem. The meeting in Italy certainly succeeded in fulfilling Mr Wright’s intent and was notable for its inclusion of many scientists at the postdoctoral and graduate student levels. It focused attention on two previously disparate but now frequently intersecting fields of