This section contains a historical essay about the Gordon Research Conferences organization.
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Creating Communities of Science: 75 Years of the Gordon Research Conferences
By Arthur A. Daemmrich and Leah Shaper
The Gordon Research Conferences (GRC) celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2006,
providing an opportune occasion to reflect on the past and explore the future. Gordon Conferences
represent a crucial but often hidden dimension of the scientific infrastructure by fostering
communication across disciplinary, national, and social boundaries and by supporting pioneer research
in a remarkable range of theoretical and applied fields.
From their modest origins in summer meetings held at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1920s
and early 1930s, the Gordon Research Conferences have expanded to attract more than twenty
thousand participants annually to one of over 350 conferences held around the world. The remarkable
growth of GRC over 75 years since its first official conference in 1931 is a product of internal and
external factors: conferences are designed to stimulate intensive discussion and real-time peer review
of new findings in science, technology, and medicine; new topics are chosen through a review process
that focuses on frontier areas; and the GRC format fosters intimacy among participants even as the
size of the scientific enterprise continues to grow at an exponential rate. This historical essay describes
how the GRC organization established a unique meeting format, managed rapid growth, supported
advances in theoretical knowledge and experimental techniques, fostered important collaborations,
promoted the founding of new fields, and helped advance applied science.