It is a rare privilege to stand in front of this group of distinguished physician-scientists today. I admit to feeling more than a little awed by this privilege for several reasons. First, as has been noted by many previous Presidents quaking in their boots up here, this podium has been host to legends—including some of my own personal heroes. I am deeply humbled to stand in the place of people like John Merrill, Eugene Braunwald, Stu Orkin, Rick Klausner, David Ginsburg, Ed Benz, Joe Goldstein, Bill Kelley, and many others who have been true leaders of American medicine. Secondly, I believe this privilege confers on me a responsibility to use this time to say something original, meaningful, and hopeful. Finally, who am I to be here at all? When I was elected, I was a Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, an academic clinical investigator. But now, I work for a drug company. Not wanting to rehash the rancor around this topic that erupted at last year’s Joint Meeting, I will only say that wherever my paycheck comes from, I am physician-scientist to the core. I am single-mindedly committed to doing clinical research with the potential for clear and immediate impact on patients and their families, guided only by the needs of those people. This is what I did when I was at Penn, and this is what I do now at GlaxoSmithKline. My laboratory group at GSK works to identify the patients most likely to benefit from new targeted cancer therapies in development, and my clinical group designs and executes the clinical trials to evaluate those drugs. It’s one of the coolest clinical investigation jobs in the world.