Comment from Jeffrey Segall

Comment on 200.432 I am an Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I have performed research for over 40 years, receiving grants, publishing over 100 papers, training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The proposed change to 200.432 has the potential to severely damage US research and prosperity because the ability to both gain and disseminate new information for American scientists will be hindered. Getting preapproval for a meeting that takes place in three or four years will limit attendance to large annual meetings that tend to focus on recently published work (which is basically several years old). In my field, for example, the American Association of Cancer Researchers (the preeminent cancer research society in America) puts together a number of novel meetings each year where the cutting edge ideas and research in a specific subfield are presented. Similarly, the Gordon Research Conferences often develop new meetings on short notice. Going to such conferences is a key way to get kept up to date on the latest ideas and research that is taking place. If we are unable to get funding to send researchers to such meetings, American science will be put at a disadvantage. For all of these reasons, the proposed changes to 200.432 should be retracted.