The Spring Research Festival came to Fort Detrick this year without its signature massive tent, the home of a sprawling equipment expo with dozens of booths. It came without audiences in auditoriums or gatherings around scientific posters. The community didn’t circulate between buildings for events. On the surface, it may have seemed that the festival didn’t come at all. But after being cancelled last year due to the pandemic, the annual two-day event did indeed return in a virtual format.

A potato, puffin, pineapple, orange, and lemon stood behind small electronic scoreboards. White text, read aloud by the Scientific Library’s Alan Doss, materialized on a blue field above their heads. “Every action has an equal and opposite…”

George Vande Woude, Ph.D., former director of the Advanced Bioscience Laboratories–Basic Research Program at what is now NCI at Frederick, passed away in April. He was known for being a prudent leader and an outstanding scientist (he and his laboratory discovered the MET oncogene in 1984), as well as for his vibrant personality and seemingly limitless energy.

The past year for Ligia Pinto, Ph.D., and her staff has been full of pressure and remote meetings at all hours of the day and night. It’s also been one of partnerships and progress. Pinto heads the Vaccine, Immunity, and Cancer Directorate, the group at the Frederick National Laboratory that’s leading the national SARS-CoV-2 Serological Sciences Network (SeroNet). At this time last year, her laboratories, which specialized in human papillomavirus, antibody science, and serology, had just been asked to help the Food and Drug Administration evaluate the quality of the new SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests that were flooding the market.

The CCR community is profoundly saddened by the recent passing of George Vande Woude, Ph.D., longtime National Cancer Institute (NCI) colleague, former director of the Advanced Bioscience Laboratories (ABL)-Basic Research Program and former director of the Division of Basic Sciences at NCI. George made many important contributions to the current understanding of the molecular biology of cancer.