The History of the Society

The Society may be said to have begun at the meeting between Ray Spier and Peter Nara when the former suggested to the latter that a society focussing on issues of vaccines and vaccination should be formed with Peter Nara as its first leader or President. This occurred during a conference on Modern Approaches to New Vaccines that was held at Cold Spring Harbor in September, 1992. Fred Brown who chaired one of the sessions at the conference allowed us to address the conferees to assess the strength of the demand for such a Society. We were rewarded with a clear indication that the participants would welcome the development of such a Society; so we set to work.
It was a busy time. Pete did most of the work in approaching numerous companies and agencies for funding while Ray focused on getting the news of the existence of the society round to build up a membership. An article was published in Vaccine (12:1052 in August 1994) and we established a secretariat with the help of Jack Acuff. The idea was that the secretariat would handle the membership, the fees and  would seek grants while the society committee would deal with those aspects of the society that progressed the objectives of the society. During these developments, Pete contacted Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) at Waltham MA. The President of that Institute, Phillips Kuhl was most enthusiastic about the possibilities that would ensue were the Society and the Institute to join forces and set up and run a vaccine conference. The Institute was already well down the line of such a venture and the additional input of the Society (membership list and suggestions for speakers) would be welcomed.

The meeting titled “ Vaccine ’94 – New Technologies and Applications” was held at the Radisson Hotel, Alexandria, Washington DC between 21-23 March, 1994. On the first day of that event, Pete invited those participants of the conference who were interested in establishing an International Society for Vaccines to meet after the end of the formal sessions for an inaugural meeting of the Society.
Those who attended this session agreed to be Founding Members of the Society. They were provided with copies of a Draft Constitution and, having changed one word, invited to accept is provisions, which were duly accepted.
Jonas Salk then proposed that Peter Nara be the Founding Chairman, Ray Spier the Founding Secretary and Raj Gupta the Founding Treasurer. These proposals were seconded by James Cowell and were carried by acclamation. The Founding Members also accepted the suggestions of the executive that the following individuals form a committee to work with the executive on the development of the Society and its activities. They were: Don Burke, Jerry McGee, Kenneth Bart, Jonas Salk, Fred Brown, Andre Meheus, Ron Ellis, Abt Osterhaus, Rino Rappuoli and Paul Gibbs. Membership fees were set at $50 for a full member.

Following close on the heels of the Washington Conference, Pete and Jack set up a new conference of the Society that was to be held in Las Vegas in association with a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. At that time we were in (fruitless, as it turned out) discussion with the ASM ( represented by Gail Cassel, its, then, President) for some sort of associate status as opposed to becoming a division of the ASM.  The meeting was held in that end of the Riviera Hotel that was not a casino on the 22-23rd May, 1994. (A summary of that meeting may be found at Vaccine 12 1358-1359)

From the May of 1994 to the September of 1997  the society did not hold any additional meetings. It had been decided after a conference call of all the members of the executive and the committee with Jack Acuff not to pursue the instigation of further meetings, as there were many such already, but to develop an advanced communications system so that vaccine workers in any country could see the state of play in vaccine R&D at an (updated) glance of abstracts that were presented for conferences and journal articles. For this a news letter and the internet would be the carriers of the information. Biotechnet was to be the gateway to the net.
Additionally, it was becoming clear that we were not making much progress is generating funds from outside the membership and that the Jack Acuff office was costing more than we could afford. Peter Nara suggested that we reorganise with a different organisation and to this end he introduced Bob LaGasse into the organisation. Discussions were held in early 1996 that culminated in the society signing an agreement for the future Executive Management of the society.
Bob and his company, Executives Consultants Incorporated, provided the society with corporate status and was active in generating a news letter. He was optimistic and believed that the membership could be increased to a level that would eventually make worthwhile the up front investment of his time and resource in the society to get it to go. One product of his activity was a meeting of the society.
In the Autumn of 1997 the Society organised a meeting at the Xerox Centre, Leesburg, Virginia (8-11 September) that was Guest Edited by Fred Brown and Peter Nara and published in the journal Vaccine as ‘Special Issue: Proceedings of the International Society for Vaccines Symposium on Vaccinology’ (vol 16 (19) pp 1777-1897, 1998). A meeting of the committee members who attended this meeting agreed to continue to pursue a policy of collecting and publicising of abstracts as well as the establishment of searchable data bases would be the core activity rather than the mounting of meetings. For this more money than that provided by the membership or the conference organisers was needed.

LaGasse was confident that this could be done. But while we were seeking funds the funds to support an office that could do the research and preparation of the abstracts, extend the membership and collect the subscriptions another organisation had decided to go into vaccine based conferences. This was The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID). By this time the Cold Spring Harbor annual conferences had come to an end and there was a gap to be filled with a vaccine R&D conference. The first of such meetings was held in Washington between the 29th May to the 2nd June, 1998. At the onset the ISV became one of the participating sponsors of this meeting and Peter Nara retains a position of a Co-Chairman of the Meeting and Member of the Conference Organising Committee as well as the Scientific Program Committee.
During the subsequent four meetings of the Vaccine Research conferences the ISV was given every facility to organise committee meetings, present publicity material and at the last, (4th) meeting (April 23-25th, 2001 Crystal City, Arlington) the ISV organised a Symposium and Luncheon and heard a lecture by Gary Nabel on Perspectives on an AIDS Vaccine .

On the organisational side, it was clear that the LaGasse experiment was not working. Money was not forthcoming in 1999 Bob handed over to Ray Spier his remaining $1000 so the latter might continue the Treasurer/Secretary job for the society.  At this time Greg Poland took over the Presidency, a new committee was coopted, a membership data base was set up and a letter requesting the annual subscription was sent out. It was also decided at the 4th meeting that a specific ISV meeting should be set up at Oxford, UK for the Summer of 2002. Indeed arrangements for such a meeting were in an advanced stage when the stunning events of the 9th September 2001 happened which cancelled all bets as the information that was given was that unless travel was absolutely necessary it should be foregone. The arrangements were put on ice.
It was decided to focus activities on the formation of this web site.
Many people had the idea of a society for individuals dealing with vaccines and vaccination before this meeting. In particular, Rajesh Gupta in the late 1980s had sent Ray Spier (as the Founder (in 1982) and Editor of the journal Vaccine) a letter urging him to begin such a society. As Ray in collaboration with colleagues  had started the European Society for Animal Cell Technology in 1976 (details in the Encyclopedia of Cell Technology, Wiley, 2000 pp 868 et seq) and this society had been successfully established by the early 1990s, it seemed timely to accept a new challenge.