Before you hit exit without finishing this, let me ask you for your patience and petition you not to stop.

I’m at our eighth annual offsite with the United States Army for the Clinical Breast Care Project, in Gettysburg, PA. I’ll spare you the “Four score and seven years ago . . .” line because our scientists are speaking right now about fluidic stations, single nucleotide polymorphism, laser capture micro dissection, proteomics and genomics.

Don’t be confused by these terms. Really, hybridization, SNP files, chromosome locations, RNA integrity, gene expression arrays and all of the other scientific terms being thrown around here all relate to our breast cancer research. It reminds me of conversations I hear in physician meetings sometimes when the level of jargon reaches its highest peak. They often are not perceived to be speaking English. In fact, I just saw a study that revealed that speaking Japanese backwards sounds the same as speaking Dutch backwards. Who would have ever guessed?

I’m convinced that the average IQ in this room is somewhere above the minimum MENSA requirements and the maximum allowable human requirements. Admittedly, one of my greatest challenges today has been that of staying focused. You see, I tend to be a multi-tasking kind of guy and, consequently, I sometimes miss the current point of the speakers most recent comments . . . “High resolution scans are all dependent upon the selection and interrogation of the peptides.” Got that? “You’re going to need at least 200,000 cells for analysis.”

Seriously, we are learning about the progress made by our scientists this year in the somewhat public forum: the number of papers selected, posters picked, speeches made or to be made. My dream is to come here and hear about the number of people that we actually helped or cured as a result of our work, but patience is a virtue. We did hear today that going to the moon was simple compared to finding the source and possible eradication of breast cancers. Yeah, engineers vs. scientists?

We have been very careful to continue to inform everyone of the necessity to co-operate, share data and move forward with all of the different sites represented here. We have been very careful to explain over and over again that our work is progressing, our research is being consumed by other scientists, our findings are being shared.

One of the most rewarding presentations happened at the end of today’s sessions where a panel of our researchers spoke individually and collectively to the crowd: a clinical nurse, two biomedical informatics specialists, a proteomic scientist and a genomic scientist, it was a virtual ensemble, my dream, a multidisciplinary approach to translational medicine.

Unfortunately, we didn’t find any cures this year, but many of us are holding securely onto our dreams convinced that our day will come. This multidisciplinary approach is new, is bold and will work. We all need to keep sharing.

[Intended for publication several weeks ago.]