Life of a Lab Rat

Lorne — the Not a Conference Report Part I

This is a pretty high-profile conference, at least within the protein world. We get some clever people speaking, or at least people powerful enough to swing a trip to Australia on their grant money. The fascinating thing is that the ability to perform cracking science and raise grant money does not necessarily correlate with the ability to give a good seminar.

So, for example, the medal lecture on the first evening was given by someone who, I'm assured, is a good man and a great scientist and humble and helpful (I spoke to someone who did a PhD in his department and then moved into sales. I found such hagiography from a sales rep a little disconcerting, but I'm happy she felt that way). I have no doubt he governs his lab well. The state of his talk, however, was more suited to an audience of medics (given the number of mice and rats that he must have killed) rather than scientists. I'm sure it would have been fascinating for endocrinologists but the title of this conference is "Protein Structure and Function". I am all for the contextualization of protein structure and function; after all, not recognizing the roles and implications of our work in a wider physiological setting is a major failing of our sub-genre, but I feel this was too much context and not enough science.

Maybe it's a culture clash thing — medics and scientists tend to be very scathing of one another. After all, the two groups have completely different goals. However, it was interesting to eavesdrop up on the whispered conversations as we left the conference hall and realize that the question on everyone's lips was "What's a sham castration?".

Moving on, the main conference hall is rather badly set up. As its day job is as a ballroom, this is maybe not surprising. The pillars and diagonal seating at the sides of the room are minor inconveniences, I suppose; but the chairs are downright diabolical. They are also too close together, so that when your neighbour falls asleep you have to keep pushing his/her head off your shoulder.

The speakers are also at a disadvantage. The 'lectern' faces sideways, so that the natural position for a speaker is to stand behind her laptop, against the wall and effectively out of sight for a third of the audience. If the stage were raised it might improve matters, but it has been very difficult to peer over heads in front and see who's talking. So top marks have to go to Matthew Freeman (MRC-LMB, Cambridge) who, as this morning's first speaker and the conference's seventeenth, was the first to come out from behind the lectern and stand facing the audience to deliver his talk. It helped that he had a remote to control his laptop, but I could see no reason why everyone else could not turn their computers around (as in fact the first after coffee did) and talk to the audience, instead of up at the screen.

The fourth talk this morning was Chris Overall (University British Columbia, Vancouver) and he also escaped the trap, also having a remote. He also used Keynote, which has some very nice transitions and effects. He did slightly overuse them, but as they are not (yet) as hackneyed as the Powerpoint transitions no one threw anything. Leemor Joshua-Tor (CSH Laboratory, New York) managed the "talk to the audience, stupid" trick straight after the coffee break without the benefit of a remote, and had a superb movie of single-stranded DNA moving through an hexameric enzyme to boot. See, it can be done. Unfortunately the following three speakers hid behind the lectern as usual. We shall see what happens this evening.

And in my next entry I shall whine about the resort's tea and coffee. Bbbrrrr.