From the President’s Desk
May 2022—In the 1990s, as immunohistochemistry was first adopted in clinical laboratories, there was palpable fear among many pathologists who believed our expertise would no longer have a role in health care. The prevailing sentiment at the time was, “If the brown stain lights up, you know it’s cancer, and they won’t need pathologists anymore.” Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. Having IHC capabilities meant there was more information that we had to process. It enabled us to extract more information from a tissue sample and to do more for our patients, but it also required more of us in terms of test selection, test interpretation, and communicating what it all meant to our fellow clinicians. More recently, next-generation sequencing has given us more, not less, to do; far from replacing us, such innovations require more of us to realize their full potential. These additions have not necessarily made our lives easier, but they have absolutely made what we can offer our patients richer and more precise.