The past year has shown much progress for our Society and many of our members will have benefited from activities of the IDS, including receiving the journal of their choice. A completely newly devised islet autoantibody proficiency programme and the "new" antibody standard was offered to all interested labs. In addition, a small workshop on antibody subclasses was conducted. A new program of the T cell workshop was offered to the cellular immunology experts. Finally, a first workshop was held on issues of humoral and cellular immunology diagnostics in the NOD mouse. Most of these activities are organised to have the final analysis ready by our next full meeting in Chennai, February 13-16, 2001. Tuesday morning, February 13, is entirely devoted to the discussion of workshop results. If you have not yet registered for this meeting, you should seriously consider to do so. Our convenor Carani B. Sanjeevi has put together an outstanding programme. Please visit our website to check (you will notice that the website has been redone entirely and is very easy to search). The IDS membership is nicely growing in size and the Society has continued to take on responsibility in the field also by publishing statements. A statement on antibodies and prediction of type 1 diabetes will soon appear in Diabetes Care. This activity had been initiated by a symposium at our past meeting in Fiuggi. Another working group is presently preparing some guidelines for intervention/prevention trials in type 1 diabetes. It is planned to have a discussion on this at IDS5 in Chennai. My term as President is coming to a close with the meeting in India. After the ballot, our newly elected President Len Harrison did not hesitate to immediately deal with several IDS matters and I am sure that Len will be an excellent leader of our Society. Kind regards, Hubert Kolb