ACS Afterthoughts
The ACS is said and done. My recap post won't be nearly as complete as the Tenderblog, but I did have a few post-conference comments...
* As you can probably guess, I saw a lot of talks. Some very good, many ho-hum, one really bad. As Bill mentioned over dinner, you come away with these conferences learning a few good things you'd like to try in your research, and a whole giant load of really bad things that you're glad you never have to do.
* Why are the Germans so obscessed with measuring the electrical properties of model lipid membranes? It seems like the perfect combination of being really, really hard and not really very interesting. And to everyone laboring to improve bilayer stability... shouldn't the field be more concerned with building this "novel biosensor" we keep mentioning on grant proposals? Let's actually make something useful - then we'll figure out how to ship it across the country. And one more thing - the trend the world has taken in the subfield of putting recombinant proteins into artificial lipid bilayers is pretty strange. The pack has either stuck with the historically successful (i.e. easy) proteins, like bacteriorhodopsin or gramacidin, or jumped straight to G protein-coupled receptors, which are probably among the most difficult to work with in all of biology. Aren't there any labs who want to find something... in between? Aside from our lab, of course. And a couple other outliers which I won't mention by name.
* Damn, just being in the downtown-Union Square-SOMA area is expensive. Eating two meals for four days in the city, plus BART fare sure does add up, and thanks to our fine state-school bureaucracy, we aren't allowed reimbursements for trips with "travel not exceeding 12 hours". We tried of offset the cost today by eating lunch at a super sketchy buffet in Chinatown. There were mixed results.
* My little poster thing went well, though in retrospect most of my group probably would have fit better in a different session. PHYS, not BIOT. Remember that. The only downer was the cash bar. The free(ish) beer at the poster session two nights prior made for a much more enjoyable evening. I got a little more loaded than was probably appropriate.
* And lastly, I was in the same room as Mr. Tenderbutton himself listening to Pete Schultz! Though I had no idea at the time - the room was stiflingly crowded and I have only a vague meta-notion as to who actually authors the blog in question. But the knowledge pleases me nonetheless. This goes up on my list of blog-celebrity-encounters with that time I had a few beers with Matthew Yglesias.
So that was that. Up next on the agenda: convincing my boss he should actually fly me somewhere interesting to do this all over again in a few months. To what exciting conference location will I travel next? Baltimore? Or... uhh... San Francisco?