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Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology is a 501(c)(3) US nonprofit organization headquartered in Silverthorne, Colorado, USA that convenes open, peer-reviewed conferences across the full range of the life sciences. Approximately 50-60 conferences take place each year. More than half the symposia are held in mountain locations across the American and Canadian West, with the remainder in coastal cities and key overseas locations. To date, the organization has held conferences on five continents. The mission of the organization is to accelerate life science discovery by connecting the scientific community across disciplines and geographic borders.

The scientific content of each conference is organized by volunteer scientists who are experts in their field. The conferences are typically three to four full days in length and consist of two daily plenary sessions, with breaks in between for informal networking. Two to three days of the conferences feature poster sessions where investigators present their work. Some afternoons feature workshops with a significant number of short talks - i.e., talks by speakers selected to speak by the scientific organizers based on the quality of their abstracts (as opposed to "invited speakers").

History and Expansion Keystone Symposia was founded in 1972 as the ICN-UCLA Symposium on Molecular Biology, a single conference on membrane research that was sponsored by ICN Corporation (since acquired by Valeant Pharmaceuticals) and organized by C. Fred Fox of the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute. The first conference was held March 13-17, 1972 in Squaw Valley, California and attracted more than 230 participants. In 1973, a conference on virology was held along with a second membrane conference. From 1974 to 1981, the organization continued to branch out, holding about a half dozen conferences a year on immunology, cancer and molecular biology in addition to continuing to hold meetings on membrane biology and virology. In 1981 it expanded its private sector support and became known as the UCLA Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology with the stated mission "to provide an interdisciplinary forum for scientists working in new and rapidly emerging areas of basic and applied biological research." In 1990, the organization severed its ties with UCLA and relocated to Silverthorne, Colorado as a free-standing division of The Keystone Center, a nonprofit organization founded by Robert W. Craig. Concurrent with this move, the name was changed to Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology. At this juncture, it was managing a yearly slate of more than two dozen meetings.

In 1992, after 20 years at the helm, Fred Fox stepped down as Director and was replaced by Darrell Doyle, who was followed in 1995 by Jim Bennett, who continued in this position until 2006. Concurrent with Bennett's appointment, the organization began a phased transition to separate from The Keystone Center and become an independent nonprofit, a process that was completed in 1997. The newly formed Board of Directors was chaired by Edward A. Dennis of the University of California, San Diego, who was succeeded by Ray DuBois of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas and then Curt Harris of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2003, James W. Aiken assumed the position of Chief Executive Officer, completing the reorganization of the Symposia.

Keystone Symposia held its first conference outside of the US in 2001 in Canada ("Hematopoiesis" in Whistler, British Columbia), followed by the first in Asia in 2005 ("Stem Cells, Senescence and Cancer" in Singapore), the first in Europe in 2006 (on "Multi-Protein Complexes Involved in Cell Regulation" in Cambridge, UK), the first in Africa in 2007 ("Challenges of Global Vaccine Development" in Cape Town, South Africa) and the first in Australia in 2009 ("Telomere Biology and DNA Repair" in Ashmore). In 2013, Keystone Symposia will hold its first conference in South America ("The Innate Immune Response in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease" in Ouro Preto, Brazil).

Keystone Symposia remains headquartered in Silverthorne, Colorado but moved to new office space in the summer of 2011.

Structure and Governance In addition to the Chief Executive Officer, Keystone Symposia is currently managed by Chief Scientific Officer David L. Woodland and a Board of Directors comprised of more than 14 leading international scientists. The current Chair of the Board is Juleen Zierath of Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Additional Board members include Ken Bair, Beverly Emerson, Peter Finan, Heidi Hamm, Edison Liu, Margaret Liu, Gary Nabel, Terry Opgenorth, Tony Pawson, Alan Sher and Ian Wilson. A Scientific Advisory Board of more than 70 scientists from academia, industry and government around the world provides additional oversight on program development. Both Boards meet twice a year – in January and June – at Keystone Resort in Summit County, Colorado.

With a staff of approximately 40 full-time, season and part-time employees, the organization sustains itself through registration fees and corporate, foundation and individual donations, as well as government grants.

Significance In addition to facilitating information exchange, the conferences provide a relaxing, informal environment where researchers can interact and forge new collaborations across disciplines. Many present and gain feedback on unpublished work. Approximately 40% of the attendees are students and postdoctoral fellows who receive mentoring via the conferences. Students and postdoctoral fellows are eligible for scholarships from Keystone Symposia to make attendance more affordable.

The Keystone Symposia Global Health Series is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and consists of 5-6 conferences each year on urgent global health topics including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, influenza and other infectious diseases. The Foundation funds Global Health Travel Awards that enable investigators from developing countries particularly affected by such diseases to attend the conferences.

The Symposia is widely perceived as a leader in the arena of managing scientific meetings and has continuously provided an interface for scientists pursuing biological and biomedical research in academia, industry and government facilities. It pioneered discussions in many important areas and has hosted thousands of participants ranging from students to Nobel laureates. While still known as UCLA Symposia, the organization held the first open, international conference devoted solely to the topic of AIDS in 1984 in Park City, Utah. At this conference, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (who later won a Nobel Prize) and her colleagues Luc Montagnier and with Jean-Claude Chermann presented their hypothesis that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus now known as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Keystone Symposia has continued to host meetings in this area every year since.