D.van Bockstaele, Jan.6, 1997
Dear Colleagues,
The board of the Belgian Association for Cytometry (BVC/ABC : Belgische Vereniging voor Cytometrie / Association Belge de Cytometrie) has had a first discussion on the proposals made by Guenter Valet concerning the foundation of a EFCS or a ECS and on the various inputs already made by other members of the discussion forum.
In principal we clearly want to encourage Guenters' efforts to install a European forum on Cytometry.
>From the discussion on the mailing list, it is however clear that some serious biases tend to occur and that some people may retreat and excert a defense strategy for their own "niche". In our opinion this is wrong and we should think about what is uniting us rather than what is separating us (Belgians are used to think in this way !).
We should not forget that cytometric techniques (already split in two major specialities i.e. flow and imaging) are being used in a lot of disciplines (both clinical and experimental hematology, immunology, pathology, molecular and cellular biology, etc...) by people from different backgounds (scientists, medical doctors, pharmacologists, engineers, etc...) : they are tools that should be used correctly in order to produce reliable results in our research or clinical work, work that is mostly published in journals of our specific discipline.
So in order to start to answer the question raised by Jim Watson, the federation should engage itself in making sure that the techniques (that unite us) are being performed in the best possible way by working on guidelines, procedures, quality control etc.. so that newcomers have some hold and so that the quality of the resulting data and articles (!) improves.
Everybody should be humble and recognise that one is only specialist
in one's own field : the federation should be interdisciplinary and
thus the board composition should not only reflect nationality ratios
but also this interdisciplinarity and last but not least -as Havard
Danielsen stated very correctly - quality !
If the federation will handle both image and flow cytometry and if the
JACP is going to be the forum of this federation, than it is clear
that the journal should broaden its scope and change its name. Again
we should be humble : please take into account that a journal focused
around techniques loses a lot of its impact once the techniques become
fairly established : most of my publications for instance (although
using FCM) are being send to journals of my discipline (i.e.
experimental hematology/medicine) with higher impact factor.