The 2011 ACR Meeting: what's new in the Windy City

College of Rheumatology (ACR) meeting in Chicago this year is the answer to the question, 'Which medical advance was developed in Chicago?' Th is nugget of information was not the product of a lecture or poster session. Rather, it was fl ashed on the computer screen in the shuttle bus that transported me every day from the Palmer House on Monroe Street to the McCormick Place convention center. Th e convention center is gargantuan and is clearly vying for designation as one of the wonders of the modern world. Alas, the territory near the center is barren and only a Hyatt Regent hotel sits forlornly at the site, anxiously awaiting some company from brethren named Sheraton, Hilton or Ritz-Carlton. Each day, the shuttle bus brought people from the downtown hotels from around the Loop and Gold Coast, through obstacles that included the snarl of traffi c, curtains of driving rain, and a road race in which seemingly every inhabitant of the state of Illinois put on his Nike shoes to run for the glory. To keep bus passengers bemused and serene during these sometimes tedious commutes, a computer system thoughtfully presented a series of questions about Chicago as divertissements and a few seconds later fl ashed the answers. Th e only medical question concerned the advance hatched in the confi nes of the Windy City. Th e choices were stethoscope, X-rays, kidney transplants and blood bank. Th e correct answer is blood bank. Before my trip, I was totally unaware of this fact and was glad to learn it along with the fi rst animal purchased for the Chicago zoo, the name of the cookie factory located in the city and the amusement park attraction that debuted on the banks of Lake Michigan. Th is information is permanently instilled in the memory banks of my brain since I had about a dozen round trips to the convention center and the questions and answers were repeated non-stop. Alas, this knowledge will not change my practice and I did not detect any commercial bias beyond some boosterism on the part of the city fathers and mothers to tout the history of a city the American poet Carl Sandburg called stormy, husky and brawling, not exactly attributes of most rheumatologists. Once off the bus at the convention center, the opportunity for real knowledge was staggering given the cornucopia of symposia, lectures and poster …