lindau

Tom Paulson gets the student perspective on Lindau. He got a quote from me, too, although I think the words of Peter Agre will have more weight. I really can't emphasize this enough: this meeting was a phenomenal experience for students.

Yesterday was my last day in Lindau, I'm sorry to say — it was also the day of the closing ceremonies on the island of Mainau, in case you were wondering why it was so quiet on the blog. I decided to leave all my electronical gear behind at the hotel and venture out for the last session with a stark naked brain. The day began with a walk down to the harbor to board the Sonnenkönigin, a very impressive ship that can only be inadequately be called a ferry. We were welcomed aboard with a glass of wine or a glass of juice if you felt 8 am was a little early to begin, and tables heaped with food.…

I just did an interview about science blogging for An Kathab, "Al Jazeera's weekly high-tech news magazine". Look for it to be broadcast on the 8th, 9th, and 10th of July, and to appear on youtube shortly thereafter. This is so going to confirm right-wing histrionics, isn't it?

This talk has me a little concerned: it's proposing something rather radical, for which Arber is going to have to show me some unambiguous evidence to convince me, and I'm coming into it with a very skeptical mindset. Here's the relevant portion of his abstract: The theory of molecular evolution that we also call "Molecular Darwinism" is based on the acquired knowledge on genetic variation. In genetic variation, products of evolution genes are involved as variation generators and/or as modulators of the rates of genetic variation. These evolution gene products act together with several non-…

Uh-oh. I'm trying to follow this talk, but it's one for the chemistry purists: I don't understand the words he's saying, starting with "olefin" and continuing with "metathesis". You'll have to look to one of the other Lindau bloggers with more chemistry to explain it, because Schrock seems to be assuming I understand all the basics already, and I don't.

The difference between biology and chemistry: biologists ask how natural systems and molecules work, while chemistry wants to know how to artificially re-synthesize natural biomolecules. Tsien favors a synthetic approach, asking hwo to build new molecules that will perform amusing and useful functions in biology. He compares it to architecture on a molecular scale that is also a rigorous test of one's understanding of molecular function. He thinks biology has the most interesting grand questions in all of science (hooray!). He also likes pretty colors. However, he thinks that…

Chalfie is interested in sensory mechanotransduction—how are mechanical deformations of cells converted into chemical and electrical signals. Examples are touch, hearing, balance, and proprioception, and (hooray!) he references development: sidedness in mammals is defined by mechanical forces in early development. He studies this problem in C. elegans, in which 6 of 302 nerve cells detect touch. It's easy to screen for mutants in touch pathways just by tickling animals and seeing if they move away. They've identified various genes, in particular a protein that's involved in transducing touch…

It's another exciting day of exciting lectures, I hope. I know that this morning was the most anticipated one on my dance card; here's what we're looking forward to. Osamu Shimomura: Chemistry of Bioluminescence Martin Chalfie: GFP and After Roger Y. Tsien: Building and Breeding Molecules to Spy on Cells, Tumors, and Organisms Richard Royce Schrock: Recent Advances in Olefin Metathesis Catalyzed by Molybdenum and Tungsten Alkylidene Complexes Werner Arber: Molecular Darwinism OK, I confess, Schrock's lecture won't be my cup of tea, and I have no idea what his title says, but the rest sound…

This morning was a long session broken into two big chunks, and I'm afraid it was too much for me — my recent weird sleep patterns are catching up with me, which didn't help at all in staying alert. Robert Huber: Intracellular protein degradation and its control This talk was a disaster. Not because it wasn't good, because it was; lots of fine, detailed science on the regulation of proteases by various mechanisms, with a discussion of the structure and function of proteasomes, accompanied by beautiful mandalas of protein structure. No, the problem was that this listener's jet lag has been…

I'm here for another long session of talks. Unfortunately, this is Big Chemistry day, and I'm struggling to keep up with the unfamiliar. I need more biology for it all to make sense! Rudolph Marcus: From 'On Water' and enzyme caalysis to single molecules and quantum dots. Theory and experiment. I was afraid of this. This Lindau conference has a primary focus on chemistry, and I am not a chemist…and I just knew there would be a talk or two at which I would be all at sea, and that was the case in Marcus's talk, which was all hardcore chemistry. I got the general gist — he's making an argument…

Ah, a solid science talk. It wasn't bad, except that it was very basic—maybe if I were a real journalist instead of a fake journalist I would have appreciated it more, but as it was, it was a nice overview of some common ideas in neuroscience, with some discussion of pretty new tools on top. He started with a little history to outline what we know, with Ramon Y Cajal showing that the brain is made up of network of neurons (which we now know to be approxiamately 1012 neurons large). He also predicted the direction of signal propagation, and was mostly right. Each neuron sends signals outwards…

There are a few people who will now appear on the blog who will be extremely peevish about Molina's talk, because he simply clearly stated the scientific consensus. We are now living in the anthropocene, when so many people exist that that we are affecting the planet's functions. CO2 and CH4 concentrations have been changing rapidly in recent decades, along with changes in temperature, and the fact of the matter is that the changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere are causally connected to changes in temperature. He showed long term records of 450,000 years of temperature and…

The first few talks this morning focused primarily on policy as illuminated by science; only the third talk was pure science. Chiechanover's talk was on both the history and future of drug research, which he characterized in terms of three major revolutions in the last century. The first revolution was a period of accidental discoveries in 1930s-1960s, where the discovery of a useful drug comes first, by observation of therapeutic effects, followed by chemical isolation, and only at the end (if at all), is the mechanism of action worked out. He gave the example of aspirin. Willow tree bark…

It is time for the first big challenge of the week: getting my circadian rhythms straightened around. It feels like about 11:30 in the evening, my biological time, but it's actually 6:30am Lindau time. Today is actually tomorrow. My strategy was actually planned. Yesterday was mostly travel through the night, and I got no sleep. I noticed as I was flying east and getting very, very tired that, as the sun came up at what was an unnatural time for me and started zapping my photoreceptors, I woke up very nicely…and then kept going through the agonizing day of missed flights and boring waits.…

The what??? Well, you see, one of the traditional events at the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting is the annual cockchafer speech. Let me explain that. The first conference in 1951 ended with a gathering of all attending Nobel laureates and their host, Count Lennart Bernadotte, to take a group photograph. Unfortunately it turned out that the laureates felt quite uncomfortable in front of the camera - and a group photograph of annoyed men would not have given the right impression of the successful first meeting. So, when Count Bernadotte saw a cockchafer lying on the ground, he picked it up and…