Banff impressions– days one and two

I have now officially been at the conference for the third day. Although Sunday had the keynote address and opening remarks, I judge it to be the wind up to the conference proper, i.e. the grueling ~14 hour day schedule I alluded to in the previous post. I jus recently got back from the last talk (incidentally by the person who had scooped me last spring) at 10:40pm. Indeed I am feeling craptacular because for whatever reason I had decided to stay at the bar until 2pm – after my three beers and three martinis. Since breakfast is served between 7am and 8:30am, I didn’t get much sleep. Indeed the plan was generally ill conceived given that I had my poster presentation today, compounded by the fact that my actual poster was hastily (and perhaps also ill) conceived. Rather than give a play by play, I’ll try to give some general impressions and anecdotes from the last two days.

The place

This is my fourth time in Banff – both the park and the city. I still marvel at the sights whenever I leave my room or head out to the talks or to meals. It’s hard to believe that anyone could take this for granted. Generally, the Rockies are magnificent and the town is quaint but somewhat overbearing in its quaint touristy pretentiousness. On Sunday night I had sought out some action in the two local bars where I’m staying and finding no one (unusual for this type of conference) I decided to head out to buy a disposable camera since I had forgot my digital at home. Earlier on Sunday I nearly walked into a deer (I wasn’t watching where I was going) quietly grazing the shrubbery outside my temporary residence. I decided I needed some apparatus to capture these things for posterity. Later that night after finding the bars deserted I headed to town to acquire my camera.

After some searching I found the SafeWay, bought my camera and headed to the liquor store to score some cheap non-monopoly sold booze.

No such luck. As free-market economics would have it, given that Banff has a captive market and that it is a tourist destination, booze was very expensive. The cheapest 26er of uncle bobs bathtub distilled gin was ~$28, approximately $5 more expensive than in Onterrible. Premium brands such as Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray went for over a $10 mark-up. After leaving in disgust I headed back to the conference centre via a convoluted and more scenic route. Having not seen Banff at night (other than being really smashed the last time I was at a conference here), I was taken aback by the shear number of Euro and Aussie trash collapsing intoxicated on the streets. Although I suspect there is a building code requiring all commercial architecture in Banff to adhere to strict esthetic rules, this does not preclude every establishment from displaying flashing neon signs advertising bars, Xtereme sports gear or tattoo and piercing shops. Given the relative sleepiness of the town during daylight hours, the drunk 20-somethings and Nevada style signage was a little surprising. But the town is home to 8000 residents and sees 4 million tourists per annum. What can one expect?

As an aside, today I saw a doe and fawn right outside the conference building, not 5m away from me. Naturally I forgot to bring my disposable camera with me.

The meeting

In my previous post I had alluded to how my presence at this meeting, a meeting on cell signalling, is a bit strange since I no longer do research in cell signalling. Since the resumption of my PhD, I have been working on gene expression. Nevertheless, the talks have by and large been rather good and this year sport a significant foreign component, hosting speakers from UCSF, Oregon, Oslo, Heidelberg and places besides. The problem though is that many felt redundant and none so far have been relevant to what my research interests. As an aside, most of these talks were put on by PIs sporting 30 man operations and budgets (and associated technology) large enough to pay for the Iraq war for a week. Some of the crazy things that I have seen in relation to real time imaging, confocal microscopy, single molecule detection, etc. has been discouraging, given that my lab, nor even my department or perhaps university has the resources to perform studies of this calibre. Moreover, it saddens me that McMaster, once a powerhouse in signalling and basic cancer research, has suffered such a blow in expertise and esteem in the last five years with its successive emigrations of expertise and grants. This year there were three representatives from Mac, including me. There was a larger contingent from Kuopio Finland. Moreover, there was also a second contingent from Turku Finland…

And Heidelberg Germany...

And Utrecht Netherlands…

And Oslo Norway…

Taken from Gold et. al, 2007 ¹.

Nevertheless, as meetings go, this one is pretty good, though a bit inbred over the years with heavy representation from Toronto and Montreal. For the first time since teacher’s college I decided to put on the charisma (what little I have) and try to mingle. Generally things have gone OK, though I have been trapped in a few awkward situations with overzealous grad students. Despite my best efforts however, mingling has been tough to do since one only has the opportunity during meals or after the talks are over - meaning after 11pm.

The other stuff

There were going to be a number of unpleasant things with which I knew I would have to deal at this meeting. One was the said business of my former supervisor who failed to include me as an author on a paper that arose as a result of my MSc work. I decided to confront my former boss (non-aggressively) over lunch on Monday and the conversation went something like this:

Necator: Ex-boss, for the sake of my mental well-being, why was I excluded from the X paper?

Ex-boss: None of your work appeared in the paper.

Necator: I cloned a partial X cDNA from RT-PCR DNA, did the phage screens to pull out the full-length clone and created a number of the constructs that were used in the paper.

Ex-boss: Oh, yeah but they had to be rederived.

Necator: Why?

Ex-boss: We lost them.

Necator:???

How convenient. Never mind that I have the constructs in my freezer at home, nor that I provided detailed sequences for the oligos and said constructs, nor the fact that they had the oligos to begin with, nor the fact that were at least one -20C and -80C stock – but I digress.

Today I had to present my shoddily assembled poster. With a raging headache (for which I’m solely responsible) I had to put on a stiff upper lip and give’er. To my surprise I discovered that there was a poster in my numbered slot on the presentation board. Incredulous at the utter moron who was numerically challenged, I barely stopped myself from tearing down his/her poster and pooing on it right there in the poster room in front of onlookers. It’s a good thing I didn’t. Upon inspection of the program my poster was listed under two different numbers in two different sections – as was that of two other students. Therefore there were two slots and three posters. With little time, I grabbed a few push pins and stuck my poster on the drywall directly opposite my numbered slot(s) and hoped people wouldn’t think I was a complete simpleton.

So there I was, standing like the village idiot by the wall, not the poster board, with the numbers 57/58 by my poster, presenting a poster that had nothing to do with signalling. I had initially hoped I would be sandwiched beside some really hot sh!t poster so that I could merge inconspicuously into the background. But now people were clammering over each other to take a gander at the buffoon who decided to stick his poster to the wall. As though this wasn’t bad enough, the PI who had scooped my work last spring showed up to interrogate me. The situation was unexpected to say the least. Given that this is a predominantly a Canadian conference on SIGNALLING and he is an American not working on signalling, his presence was more than unusual. It’s as though the fates not only choose to kick me in the balls when it’s convenient but they also actively seek me out. Again to compound the insult, it turns out that he’s also performing the same experiments that we decided to include after the scoop, meaning he’s out to scoop me again. Only difference is that he has three post-docs and an army of grad students to make things go. My boss only has me.

Well, so it goes. 2008 is looking utterly awesome. After being scooped three times, it looks like the fourth time I have been politely informed that I’m going to be scooped. I may be starting to believe in a deity, and he seems like that genocidal misogynistic, misanthropic Old-Testament prick after all. Now all I need is the BH to turn into a pillar of salt. Knowing my luck I'd have neither Tequila nor lime.

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1. If one stares at this stereoscopic protein model properly, in the fashion of the magic eye pictures, one can see the image in 3D. It’s a trick I picked up while in a crystallography lab. This structure was not presented at the meeting. However, the PI for the said work is here presenting other data. I needed something sciency looking but I’m tired and got tired of looking.