The Founding of AORTIC

Founded in September 1982, AORTIC was active only between 1983 (when its inaugural conference was held in the City of Lome, Togo, West Africa) and the late 1980s. The organization subsequently became inactive and moribund. In 2000, a group of expatriate
African physicians and scientists joined in an effort with their non-African friends and colleagues to reactivate the dormant organization. Since its reactivation, AORTIC has succeeded in putting cancer on the public health agenda in many African countries by
highlighting Africa’s urgent need for cancer control and by holding meetings every two years in various African cities. National and international cancer control organizations worldwide have recognized the challenges facing Africa and have joined in AORTIC’s mission.

Founded during the 13th International Cancer Congress held in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., September 1982, AORTIC was as the product of a lunch break discussion of the record of excellence in collaborative research, treatment, and education in cancer in the 1950s and the 1960s at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria) and Makerere University (Uganda).
During those decades, those institutions had been centers of attraction for international cancer researchers. It was about this time that the unique childhood cancer of African children that later became known as Burkitt lymphoma was recognized.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, those achievements had become a thing of the past. It was the joint desire to bring back the achievements of those “golden years” of Africa-based excellence in cancer work that resulted in the founding of AORTIC.

To that end, a provisional committee consisting of the four participants in that lunch break discussion was formed: Dr. Victor Anomah Ngu of the Republic of Cameroon was to serve as Chair, Dr. Toriola F. Solanke of Nigeria, as Chair of the Organizing Committee, Dr. Christopher K.O. Williams of Nigeria as Secretary-General, and Dr. James F. Holland of the United States as Scientific Advisor. The committee was to identify and contact established African doctors and scientists interested in neoplastic diseases and to raise funds for a meeting in Africa to organize an inaugural meeting of the organization in an African country.

For more information, click here: The AORTIC Historical Perspective

The Co-Founders of the African Organisation For Research And Training In Cancer (AORTIC) as they looked at the time of the founding of AORTIC. Top left: Toriola F. Solanke; Top right: Christopher K.O. Williams; Lower left: James F. Holland; lower right: Victor A. Ngu. Pictures of Drs. Solanke and Williams are reproduced from personal photo archive. (The pictures of James F. Holland and Victor A. Ngu are reproduced from the Lasker Foundation web site (www.laskerfoundation.org)