A Closer Look at BBO-11818, One of the RAS Initiative’s Newest Drugs

One year ago, the Poster staff and colleagues at NCI and Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research bid a heavy-hearted farewell to Rich Folkers, formerly the Poster senior editor and NCI Frederick communications manager. He passed away in April 2025 at the age of 65. One year has given us time to reflect on his life and legacy. Both made a difference to us.

Nadya Tarasova, Ph.D., clicked her mouse a few times, repositioning some letters and lines on her computer screen. The program on display looked like it could be Photoshop’s distant cousin, but even an uninitiated onlooker could’ve seen this wasn’t artwork. It was SLICE, one of the world’s first—and newest—chemistry coding programs to have a graphical interface.

The Scientific Library employees at NCI’s Frederick Cancer Research Center repeated history in 1972, perhaps without realizing it. Much like the librarians who opened the Camp Detrick Technical Library in 1943, they were among the first staff to begin working at the epicenter of what would soon become an important scientific facility. And like in the early days of Camp Detrick, the Scientific Library rapidly became a hub for information and technology during the FCRC’s first years.

While World War II raged, engineers and tradespeople built up a little airport that’d sat humbly on the outskirts of Frederick since 1929, transforming it into a microbiological research facility. The site, renamed “Camp Detrick,” was to be the home of the new U.S. Army Biowarfare Research Laboratories. This is where the story of the NCI Frederick Scientific Library truly begins.

Experts across scientific fields will convene at Hood College in Frederick, MD, from June 16–18 for the fourth Life Sciences Symposium, aiming to ameliorate the so-called “reproducibility crisis” in research. The three-day symposium is intended to devise and drive solutions to reproducibility issues in biomedical sciences.