Foreword to ‘Meet the Professors: Focused on Lung Cancer Precision Medicine’
July 31 to August 4, 2009, San Francisco, where we attended the World Conference of Lung Cancer (WCLC) for the very first time. At the conference, I had the honor to meet Prof. James R. Jett, the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology at the time, with whom we discussed the challenges Chinese clinicians constantly faced in writing and publishing English research papers in medicine. After nearly six months of preparation with the cooperation between AME Publishing Company and Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases/State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease/The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, we founded the first AME English journal, the Journal of Thoracic Disease (known as JTD, indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded in Feb 4, 2013).
July 3 to 7, 2011, Amsterdam, the 14th WCLC, AME Publishing Company exhibited overseas for the first time. There we rented a small booth. Scarcely any readers paid attention to the JTD journals we exhibited.
October 27 to 30, 2013, Sydney, our third participation in the WCLC, where we promoted the focused issue of “Lung Cancer” in the JTD Vol 5, Supplement 5 (October 2013) guest-edited by the co-chairperson of the conference, Prof. Kwun M. Fong. During the conference, many participants came over to inquire about the focused issue, which was warmly received among them. I, thereby, came up with an idea: to set up an office in Sydney. It was until April 19 this year that I had this dream finally came true.
October 15 to 18, 2017, Yokohama, the 18th WCLC. We are going to attend the conference the fourth time. This time, we hope to do something new, something different—other than getting a more decent booth and putting our catalogues into the conference tote bags, we put together this focused issue “Meet the Professors: Focused on Lung Cancer Precision Medicine” with painstaking efforts.
A young Section Editor of JTD once said, “I wish one day Chinese doctors and scholars would no longer be handicapped by the barrier of language and could concentrate fully on academic research. I wish one day our people could use our own language to write esteemed papers that worldwide researchers would scramble to cite.” As we all know, in China and other non-native English speaking countries, language is an immense obstacle to the writing and publishing of research papers that hinders the timely production of a great deal of good research and findings. As a result, their works cannot get due attention. We, therefore, hope to conduct in-depth interviews with these top-rated experts in the field of lung cancer. From another perspective and in another manner, we have their research work, clinical practice, way of thinking and wisdom condensed into papers and inks, so that experts from all over the globe can see the achievements China has made over the years in the field of lung cancer precision medicine and hopefully enlighten the peers worldwide.
It is for this reason that the focused issue “Meet the Professors: Focused on Lung Cancer Precision Medicine” dedicated to the 2017 WCLC appears on the scene. This issue is a congregation of the in-depth interviews featuring 16 top Chinese experts in the field of lung cancer. At the 2017 WCLC, we are going to have this issue given out to participants to let the voices of these experts be heard by the world.
In these interviews, the 16 experts will talk over past and present and take you through their daily routines from medical treatment and scientific research to their cultivation of younger fellows and their stories of success and failure. They are going to discuss the latest advances in research, share their ideas and points of views, and reveal the difficulties and challenges they encounter, so that worldwide experts can learn the unique features of Chinese doctors. Even though some of the views or predictions they put forward are awaiting more data or evidence to speak for themselves, perhaps in ten to twenty years, an academic article published somewhere may strike you that you ever came across these enigmas mentioned in this issue, to which you will then be able to get the final answers.
Be that as it may, at the moment, I hope this issue can inspire readers and give peers reference and direction, while at the same time showing the world the demeanor of Chinese doctors and setting role models for younger generations.
