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<\/p>\nI’ve just returned from a lab retreat at the Convento de Arr\u00e1bida, a crumbling former Franciscan monastery about twenty miles south of Lisbon. Clinging to a hillside overlooking the sea, the white stucco buildings were set in a landscape of jagged limestone, scrubby bushes, cypress and pine, oak and gorse. Life teemed everywhere: small green songbirds, tiny lizards and a pod of dolphins cavorting in the waves far below. Every morning I woke to the sun rising over the sea, luminous lavender fog hovering just over its surface.<\/p>\n
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\nThe best-laid plans<\/strong> How do cells build things so well?<\/p>\n \nIn some ways it was an odd venue for an exercise in information exchange. The original brothers founded the order after deciding that the missionaries who’d gone forth into the New World with the waves of Portuguese explorers were becoming irrevocably tainted in the process. Their solution was to turn inward: they lived together but were not allowed to speak or interact. Instead, they ate only bread and water, flagellated themselves and slept on the cold stone floor with minimal clothing for maximum discomfort. (Indeed, some of them ended up decamping to small, stalagmite-studded caves in the hillside, deeming the quality of life in the Convento too ‘luxurious’.) <\/p>\n \nOur mission couldn’t have been more different. We were joining forces with a Portuguese group of similar interests, and the idea was to share knowledge and generate totally new research ideas in the process: in short, to view our projects with the fresh perspective that only an outside view can bring. <\/p>\n \nWe hadn’t met one another before, but fortunately we all got on splendidly, especially after the vinho do Porto<\/em> and aguadente<\/em> started to circulate that first evening. The two lab heads were keen to stimulate our creative sides, so in the morning we all sat in the sun on the terrace and composed posters of our work using colored pens and paints. It was actually quite challenging to summarize my work pictorially, in one snapshot, without the crutch of a ten-hour PowerPoint session or the benefit of the ‘delete’ key. And most of the efforts that resulted were a lot clearer than the sort of painstaking, over-produced presentations you see hanging in an average poster session.<\/p>\n \nAfter one particularly hard day of scientific discussions about cell architecture and development, we were put into multiple groups and given thirty minutes to build towers using only drinking straws, envelopes and tape, strong enough to support the weight of eight candles. What resulted was a glorious mess of unintelligent design; just as evolution has had to overcome various physical laws to lay down the amazing array of structures that occur in multicellular organisms, so our towers ran the gamut of possible design strategies. Interestingly, the biologists did a lot better than the small bevy of physicists, who’d smugly clubbed together convinced that they’d win hands down. The best solution, in the end, wasn’t as intuitively clever or complicated.<\/p>\n \nDid we achieve our aims? I think so. A number of collaborations were initiated, and I got some fantastic ideas for my own project after being inspired by a few of the zebrafish crowd. As the line of cars lumbered past the main gate of the old monastery on that last morning, I suffered a twinge of sadness thinking about those long-dead monks, consigned to a life of silence and non-interaction. I am sure that their spiritual universe was rich and fulfilling, but I for one am happy to live in a world in which I can reach outward as well as in.<\/p>\n \n I’ve just returned from a lab retreat at the Convento de Arr\u00e1bida, a crumbling former Franciscan monastery about twenty miles south of Lisbon. Clinging to a hillside overlooking the sea, the white stucco buildings were set in a landscape of … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.lablit.com\/images\/Convento.jpg\")
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