Conference Report

Dropped off the radar for a little bit, there (science is a harsh mistress, who sometimes calls for 72-hour growth curves, with timepoints taken every 6 hours), but I'm back and more or less well-rested now, so, as promised, the full story of last weekend's adventure.

The whole premise of the thing was to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the discovery of the archaea by Carl Woese and George Fox at the UI at Urbana-Champaign. Archaea are, of course, the third great domain of life, along with the bacteria and the eukaryotes, and Woese was the first one to recognize that the methanogens weren't just wierd bacteria, but something else entirely. (That's Carl Woese with me and Jorge there in the picture.) He's an interesting character; a real crotchety, opinionated old dude.

The connection to me is that Jorge was a first-year graduate student in Ralph Wolfe's lab at Urbana in 1977. Wolfe had been studying the methanogens for years at that point, and was naturally excited by the phylogenetic data coming out of the Woese lab down the hall, so he played a big role in the whole early days of the field. Jorge was one of the speakers at the conference, along with Wolfe, Fox, Woese, and a whole bunch of other guys from those early days. It was very odd to hear him talking about my results.

It was a neat weekend. Lots of interesting characters (Karl Stetter, the German who's identified most of the archaea known to grow above 100°C, is a nut.), funky organisms (like Pyrobaculum spherical virus, which has a 40kb genome with about 50 ORFs, none of which have any homology to anything in the databases), and strange stories. Bill Balch, who was a post-doc in Wolfe's lab back then, was reminiscing with Jorge about the time that "Boom-boom" blew up their anaerobic chamber and knocked down a wall in the lab. ("Boom-boom" has apparently gone on to be a librarian...)

Urbana seems like a nice place, actually. We had a native guide; Chi did his undergrad there, and he took us to a really excellent Korean restaurant, but there was also some pleasant schmoozing with microbiologists in bars. The campus is really pretty, too. Overall, I thought it seemed like a pleasant place to be.