IOM roundtables provide a venue in which individuals representing many different perspectives can come together to discuss important issues facing health and medicine today. Roundtables provide a forum for exploring the interfaces between the various aspects of science and the diverse characteristics of health care and public health. This workshop follows on a successful meeting convened by the Roundtable of Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine last year, Rebuilding the Unity of Health and the Environment, which emphasized the multiple interrelationships that exist among the social, natural, and built environments as they relate to human health. All of these efforts have highlighted the importance of understanding the wide array of elements that might influence the health of individuals and populations—where they live, what they eat, how they live, where they work, how they raise their children, and how they do their work.

One of our goals is to encourage health professionals—physicians, nurses, and others in their communities—to recognize that these are not issues limited to the public health department or to sanitary engineers. These are issues for all of us in the health professions. Enhanced communications between the professions and the community will be necessary to convey information about the interactions between who we are genetically and the environment in which we live. These concerns remain central to gaining insight into what can be done to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer as well as numerous other diseases, and they stress the multidisciplinary nature of the challenges we have before us.