Meetinged out

The meeting season is finally over. Now is the time to remind myself what a scientific gathering is really like. This way, I may yet gather the courage to decline the pressing invitation from my old friend who’s trying to get me to the shores of Lake Erie in February 1998 for her fabulous meeting on the chiral centers of bubblyomuctase reductase. The first treat is getting ready to go. If you’re a student or post-doc you’ll sweat bullets as you struggle to get the results you’ve already put into your abstract. If you run a lab, you’ll spend three days bouncing off the walls of your office as you try to finish your grant and all the tasks that were too painful to contemplate last week. One way or the other you’ll be lucky to get three hours sleep before you show up bleary-eyed and grumpy for your 7 a.m. flight. But even after you’ve made it to your flight, you can’t relax. Before you attempt to arrange yourself in your minuscule seat, ask yourself for the last time if you have your slides or poster materials (once I didn’t), and whether you really did turn off the stove as you left the house. Instead of identifying the emergency exit nearest you, examine the area for the nearest haggard mother and wailing infant, and check that the pilots have remembered to extend the wing flaps for take-off. If they haven’t, choose between being publicly told by the flight attendant that this aircraft lacks extendible wing flaps and finding out whether your seat cushion really works as a flotation device when the plane plunges into the San Francisco bay. But getting there is only half the fun. The other half is staying there with your mystery room-mate. If you’re the sort who has two or three beers after the evening session, your co-habitant will have gone to bed at ten. Feeling the guilt of the dissolute, you’ll creep into the pitch black room, smash your shin on the invisible but razor-sharp bed, and collapse in silent agony into fitful and jet-lagged sleep. At precisely 5.30 a.m., your room-mate’s alarm clock will shatter your dreams, El Virtuoso will spring whistling from his bed, fling open the curtains, fire up his electric razor, and turn on the TV to see what’s happening in the world. (This actually happened to me once. I’m out on parole.) Sleep-deprived and irritable you’ll limp to the first session. In summer the room will either resemble an oven or be air-conditioned to the point of frostbite. Whichever it is, you will have dressed for the other possibility. If the meeting is in some bucolic location, the talks will be given in ballrooms or gymnasia. Those sitting at the back will see only the top half of the screen, and hear the talks as indistinctly as an old-fashioned transatlantic phone call. Some of the talks will be fabulous. Great speakers will give spell-binding presentations, describing wonderful experiments that you would not even have dreamt were possible. These talks and the excitement and discussions they spawn are what make meetings worthwhile. Unfortunately, other talks will be horrid. Not because the science is bad, but because the speaker simply compressed their 50-minute, 50-slide seminar into a 20-minute talk. The introduction and discussion are thrown out and you’re treated to a whiplash tour of 27 slides of mental (gel) retardation assays, each of which has 10 more lanes than you need to grasp the key point. If you’re especially unlucky, the speaker will have used one of the programs created for traveling salesmen that superimpose all the data points on a Technicolor sunset, and use color schemes designed to identify the substantial color-blind minority. (A constructive suggestion for those who over-run: take a leaf out of the physicists’ book. Present everything except a few data slides (there should ideally be fewer than 5 of these, and never ever more than 10) as overhead transparencies. This way, when you discover you’ve grossly underestimated the length of the presentation, you can skip half of the overheads without anyone knowing, instead of making life hell for the 15-year-old projectionist by asking them to skip the next 12 slides. You can also make new overheads on the plane or at the meeting, adjusting your presentation to suit the length of your talk and the composition of your audience.) Will things improve at the afternoon poster sessions? Again, some posters will be great: a few sentences in big, big type, simplified figures, and a clear explanation of why the experiments were done and what we learn from them. Sadly, others will be my-paper-presented-unabridgedon-a-large-vertical-surface with acres of minuscule text and horrendously complicated figures. My golden rule is that a poster should use less than 500 short words. For many visitors, this will be plenty, and specialists will be happy to ask for details. Finally, don’t forget the physical effects. A meeting can leave you barely half human. Your brain swims with unprocessed information, your liver is working overtime to detoxify the beer you’ve consumed, and lack of sleep has turned you into a zombie. It may take weeks to recover. So, next time you say “Yes, I’ll come”, make sure that it’s because you’re attracted by the science, not because you’re too polite to say no, or suffering from a misplaced belief in the value of ‘networking’.