Brian - Congratulations on your upcoming induction into such an exclusive group! Well done and well deserved I am sure.

Clearly you have traveled a particular path of learning much further than I. And, I have great respect for your expertise and your willingness to share it with new folks - like me. All that sincerely said, let me take issue with you.

I do not share your easy dismissal of SEER data. "Guesstimating" from samples is what data mining and research are all about. Prediction is the whole purpose of research. SEER samples are, as you say, from limited locations, but they do come from a dandy variety of important locations across the country. They do not present their data as randomly gathered, or fully representative of national trends, but they have done a good job of correcting/adjusting their samples and analyzing their data carefully. The sample sizes are large enough to be trend significant and they do show improvements in survivability. These improvements may not matter to you, but they matter to those persons counted, and they surely offer hope in this 'hope-limited' club we have all joined.

Your apparent cynicism about research progress is well founded from your sources I am sure. You report that you have a seat on the Oral Cancer Work Group. Who are these people and how broad is the reach of their data? How do they keep up with research trends - or do they speak only from their own research?

And don't sweep away the recent research findings about cisplatins + radio. Though I cannot relocate the abstract (yet), a group of Korean researchers has isolated the protein mechanism of squamous cell cancers - causing some to become radio resistant, and thereby likely leading to disease metastisis and recurrence. This study may raise some important treatment issues and lead us to protein analysis of tumors before the tx plan is drawn up. This is potentially no small step forward.

Perhaps we could share your views if we knew where they came from. Perhaps your technical assertions would be more useful to us if we could see them in a context beyond the views of one committee or one treatment center. As you have said repeatedly, its very hard to see this disease on a broad scale. How then do you do so?

And no one here is challenging the need to find this disease earlier. Your obvious passion about this is, I am sure, shared by many among us. Your expertise and your passion are obvious cornerstones in this forum. Your assertions and technical language seem to sweep challenges aside. Please don't think me unloyal or ungrateful. Tom