A Few Thoughts About the 2012 San Fran­cisco ASM Gen­eral Meet­ing

by Elio

I re­cently re­turned from the ASM yearly gen­eral meet­ing in San Fran­cisco. It hap­pens to be 61 years, no less, since I at­tended my first such event, that one in Chicago. In those days, many mem­bers at­tended a gi­ant ban­quet as part of the event, I well re­mem­ber. As a poor grad­u­ate stu­dent, I couldn't af­ford the few dol­lars it cost, so I ate else­where. Lucky me; the en­tire as­sem­blage of mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gists came down with food poi­son­ing!

Golden Gate Bridge at Night. Source

At­tend­ing ASM gen­eral meet­ings was ex­cit­ing then, as it is now. And the of­fer­ings have got­ten even bet­ter, es­pe­cially in re­cent years. In the old days, be­fore posters were in­vented, the prin­ci­pal means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion was ten minute oral pre­sen­ta­tions. Of ne­ces­sity, this en­tailed si­mul­ta­ne­ous pre­sen­ta­tions in a huge num­ber of rented meet­ing halls and re­quired a pair of roller-skates for at­ten­dees to get from one to an­other in time. The dis­ap­pear­ance of short pre­sen­ta­tions is not rued by any­one I know. What came into be­ing were more sym­posia pre­sented by in­vited em­i­nent sci­en­tists. In the last year, the ASM has un­der­taken even greater changes, es­sen­tially tight­en­ing the pro­gram to fewer ses­sions and en­sur­ing that the qual­ity is even higher. I like this a lot be­cause I can still get to hear truly good sci­ence with­out feel­ing schiz­o­phrenic. And posters have their proper place, giv­ing a large num­ber of ju­nior peo­ple the chance to present their work in a dis­cus­sion-friendly set­ting.

This meet­ing co­in­cided with the an­nounce­ment of the first large-scale hu­man mi­cro­biome project. Un­veil­ing of the re­sults re­ceived con­sid­er­able at­ten­tion. I con­fess, I stayed away from these ses­sions. Not that this isn't im­por­tant work. Au con­traire, it's es­sen­tial for progress in our sci­ence and for un­der­stand­ing the role of mi­crobes in our lives. How­ever at this stage of de­vel­op­ment, the pre­sen­ta­tions tend to dis­play large ta­bles of data, usu­ally the names of bac­te­r­ial fam­i­lies or phyla in fancy vi­sual ar­ray, or re­count mind­bog­gling clever new strate­gies. This also ap­plies for ses­sions on syn­thetic bi­ol­ogy, which I did at­tend. The pre­sen­ters were not al­ways im­bued with mod­esty. Not that I blame them, but some of them sounded like Colum­bus giv­ing his first sem­i­nar af­ter his re­turn. This im­pa­tience of mine is noth­ing new be­cause sci­ence in the mak­ing is not al­ways sat­is­fy­ing to the lis­tener. In time, all of this will be as­sem­bled into con­cep­tual bins (hey, there is a new term, bin­ning) and be­come eas­ier on the ears as the mean­ing of the re­sults will be bet­ter un­der­stood. But do con­sider at­tend­ing these meet­ings, or com­ing back to them again. Miss­ing them is miss­ing great sci­ence.