The purpose of the NCRR Comparative Medicine Resource Directors' meeting is to facilitate communication between funded resource centers and NIH staff on important programmatic issues and to enhance information exchange among the individual resources. Both the Resources and NCRR have a mission to provide valuable resources to the biomedical research community and, ultimately, to public health. The first Resource Directors' meeting was held at the University of Miami National Resource for Aplysia on February 4-5, 1999. The twenty-seven Resource Directors who attended agreed that the meeting was timely and useful and that several subgroups should be formed to address topics from the Working Groups and develop recommendations for the next meeting. As a result of feedback requested by NCRR, the scientific presentations for the upcoming meeting are genetic management, zoonotic diseases, and data management. Genetic management will be the topic for the keynote address and an excellent lead into a small group discussion on this topic. There are two areas that the Resource Directors felt warranted explicit follow-up from the first meeting: intellectual property provisions as they affect resource collections and distribution and tracking of resource users and publications. Preparatory working groups for these two areas are being formed to gather information and to work with NCRR staff to determine important discussion points. Before the meeting the two Working Groups will define the issues clearly and pool information about how various resource centers are handling the problems and requirements involved. The proceedings of the meeting will be published and posted as previously on the NCRR website for dissemination among the scientific community at large. This application seeks support for this second annual meeting to be held at the ATCC in Manassas, Virginia on April 27-28, 2000.
