Mak­ing Waves at Asilo­mar

by Elio

It's sel­dom that a bug has a neg­a­tive ef­fect on me. It's usu­ally just the op­po­site: bugs make my day. But this time, some kind of bron­chi­tis virus pre­vented me from go­ing to a meet­ing that I would have truly loved to at­tend. The In­te­grated Mi­cro­bial Bio­di­ver­sity Pro­gram, un­der the um­brella of the Cana­dian In­sti­tute For Ad­vanced Re­search (CIFAR), re­cently held their an­nual meet­ing in Asilo­mar, Cal­i­for­nia. The lo­ca­tion speaks to their will­ing­ness to tran­scend na­tional bar­ri­ers; the pro­gram, their tran­scend­ing of con­ven­tional aca­d­e­mic bar­ri­ers, as well. The pa­pers cov­er­ing nu­mer­ous eco­logical and evo­lu­tion­ary as­pects of mi­cro­bial life were pre­sented by lead­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tors from Canada and be­yond. In­cluded were such lu­mi­nar­ies as Tom Cav­a­lier-Smith, Ford Doolit­tle, Jonathan Eisen, Patrick Keel­ing, For­est Ro­hwer, and Cur­tis Sut­tle, to name just a few.

Asilo­mar break­ers. Source

I had been asked to present sto­ries from this blog, some­thing that I have done with plea­sure at sev­eral other venues. But this one would have been ex­tra spe­cial. On all ac­counts, I missed out on what was truly my kind of meet­ing.

A few words about CIFAR from their web­site:

CIFAR has as­sem­bled a team of lead­ing re­searchers from across Canada and around the world that is ca­pa­ble of tak­ing on the mon­u­men­tal task of ex­plor­ing this as­tound­ing uni­verse of bac­te­ria, viruses, and other mi­crobes.

CIFAR's In­te­grated Mi­cro­bial Bio­di­ver­sity pro­gram is trans­form­ing hu­man un­der­stand­ing of the web of life, and chang­ing the way we ap­proach med­i­cine and health, en­vi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­ity, and evo­lu­tion­ary bi­ol­ogy it­self.