Hello Maine!<\/p>\n
\nI’m at a Gordon Conference. The thing about Gordon Conferences is that they’re totally confidential – I’m not allowed to publish any data from anyone else. So I can’t tell you plebes about it in anything more than broad generalities.<\/p>\n
\nWhat I can do is have a bit of a whinge.<\/p>\n
\nYou’ve got these amazingly bright scientists, right? Top of the game, right? Sharpening their steel against similarly-brained scientists. Right.<\/p>\n
\nSo you have to wonder if they realize what they’re actually saying \u2014 or how they say it. Nearly every speaker has turned their side to the assembled brainiacs, looked at the screen, and read the words that were there. Usually while pointing out the word they were reading at the time like that little bouncing dot you get on the words in Playschool<\/em>. Each slide has about 30 gels and 500 words. No wonder the evening sessions are hard work for me, jet-lagged as I am.<\/p>\n \nThe things people say. We had one talk in which we had a ‘strikingly’, followed two sentences later by an “even more strikingly”. Every lab, it appears, has a “really terrific graduate student” or an army of “very talented postdoc”s \u2014 sometimes both. I was longing for someone to say “Yeah, this guy was all right, I guess.” <\/p>\n \nApparently, “bulging is not required”. “tRNA has a crucial role in translation”, which wins my nomination for the Most Useless Slide Title Ever<\/em>. And whoever thought that blue cells on a black background were ever going to be visible from the back of a lecture theatre, at 9 at night?<\/p>\n \nJust had one talk that gladdened this cynical heart, though. She got up, stood in front of the screen, faced the audience and treated us to a delightful and enthusiastic treatise on the release of calcium from intracellular stores. Fantastic, clear slides, positively contagious enthusiasm and very, very well informed. Almost makes me wish I worked in this field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello Maine! I’m at a Gordon Conference. The thing about Gordon Conferences is that they’re totally confidential – I’m not allowed to publish any data from anyone else. So I can’t tell you plebes about it in anything more than … Continue reading