G.Valet Nov.29,1996
Nov.29, 1996 Dear colleagues,
the Nov.96 edition of the ESACP Newsletter has just been activated in the internet under: http://www.biochem.mpg.de/valet/esanew96.html
Furthermore, the various contributions to the discussion forum are now available under: http://www.biochem.mpg.de/valet/efcsdis1.html The contributions are listed according to authors and time sequence with intramessage links when references to other messages are made. This will hopefully avoid to get lost after a while.
The refreshing part of this discussion is that we all have strong ideas but we are not really "biased" by now. To add a little bit to the acronym confusion we could also think of a European Society for Cytometry (ESC) or European Cytometry Society (ECS) instead of a federation or union. This offers the advantage of having personal and corporate members (e.g. national cytometric societies, working groups) in the same association. Whether ESC/ECS emerges from ESACP or whether ESACP would be a corporate member of ESC/ECS would have to be determined.
A counterargument could be that ESC/ECS and the national societies would then compete for the same members. This may be to some extent true but since ESC/ECS by definition treats cytometry issues of European concern, I would not think that this could constitute a serious problem to national cytometric societies.
My personal tendency is to have then ESC/ECS emerge from ESACP as the simplest solution. ESC/ECS foundation would clearly offer a better access for scientists from European countries without cytometric societies, a problem which has been convincingly outlined by Havard Danielsen. We would also avoid the inactive "old guys club" into which a federation or union may indeed turn after a while.
Best regards
G.Valet