The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Annual Meeting, a major event for medical educators, will be held November 2-7, 2001 at the Hilton Washington and Towers and the Omni Shoreham Hotels in Washington, D.C. This meeting will mark the AAMC’s 125th anniversary.

Highlights at this year’s meeting include a special plenary session featuring a panel of four Nobel Laureates who will discuss the future of research and what that future might mean for medical educators.

Speaking of the future: The AAMC is discontinuing the electronic message service that it has offered at past meetings. “Even after five years experience, fewer than half of the meeting registrants actually used the message kiosks to communicate with other attendees or with their home offices,” writes Jordan J. Cohen, MD, AAMC’s chief executive, in an introductory letter to the conference literature. “By eliminating this costly service, we have been able to hold the registration fee at the same level as last year. The AAMC’s tech lab in the Hilton Washington will provide internet access for its program sessions, so we will open it Friday – Monday evenings to permit those of you who do not travel with lap-tops an opportunity to check home Email.”

An innovation for this year’s meeting is the creation of the final program as a .pdf file at the conference website . This is in response to complaints from attendees that the scientific program is never mailed in time for the meeting. (The reason the program isn’t printed well ahead of the meeting is that many AAMC sessions continue to change right up to meeting time—it’s not like a meeting where all material is peer-reviewed ahead of time.) With the posting of the final program at the web site, attendees will be able to access it prior to attending the meeting.