Odense, September 11, 2026
Dear all,
I guess that most of you remember that today, it is 25 years ago that the terrorist organization al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airliners and ordered two of them to crash into the Twin Towers in New York at around 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) (3:00 p.m. Central European Time (CET)). Both towers collapsed completely, and nearly 3,000 people were killed. It was, at the time, the most serious terrorist attack ever. Aviation stopped for several days all over the world, and the world has never been the same since!
I suppose that not very many of you remember that the 5th EACPT (The European Association for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics) Congress took place in Odense that year and that it began with a speakers’ reception at the Town Hall of Odense in the evening of 9/11. I was the president of the meeting, and I and many others had worked very hard for more than four years in planning it and had invested around 1 million DKK. If the terrorist attack had taken place on 9/10, or if the congress had started on 9/12, I would probably have had to cancel the meeting because no one except the Danish participants and speakers would have been able to come to Odense.
I spent most of 9/11 together with the world-famous American psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen
from the University of Iowa, who was invited to give a keynote lecture in the afternoon of 9/11 and another in the morning of 9/12. She and her husband had arrived in Odense the evening before and were accommodated at the OCC hotel, which gave me the opportunity to show her Odense and parts of Funen on 9/11. We first went to the Hans Christian Andersen Museum, Odense Cathedral, and, not least, the ECCO shoe shop on Flakhaven. We had lunch at Den Gamle Kro in Overgade, and after lunch we drove to Nyborg to see the castle. On our way back to Odense, a journalist from Fyens Stiftstidende called me. He wanted to interview me about the congress, but all he could whisper was that two jets had flown into the Twin Towers in New York, and he urged me to watch on TV2 Denmark or CNN, which I did. It was my sad task to inform Nancy about what had happened, and as we drove from OCC to Winsløwparken, where she gave her first talk, we listened to the news on the radio and heard President Bush speaking live in his now famous address to the American people. It was very surreal.
There were approximately 850 registered participants including approximately 150 invited
speakers at the congress, and nearly everybody made it to Odense. As I said in my opening
remarks at the official opening on 9/12, when someone in the future asks you, “What did you
do on 9/11/2001?”, you can say, “I was in Odense for the 5th EACPT Congress.” I am sure that
most of them also remember that they were there for a very good meeting that took place in
the shadow of 9/11 but was not overshadowed by it!
Best regards,
Kim Brøsen, VIP
The Faculty of Health Sciences
Department of Public Health
Clinical Pharmacology, Pharmacy and Environmental Medicine
University of Southern Denmark