Day 3: "I'll shit like a wildcat for a week if you put my name on the paper"
It's been pointed out to me that I haven't actually mentioned what meeting I'm at. It's the 2006 International Congress on Adenovirus.
Thursday's program was scheduled from 9AM til 10PM. Given the windbagosity of any scientist provided with a chance to describe their work, or ask a question to show how much the know at the end of every talk, 10PM was a generous estimate at best. Today continued the entry session (over which there is a good deal of healthy debate) and led into "Replication and Host Cell Interactions" before ending with "Evolution". Like every meeting, there are good and bad talks. The good ones seem to whiz by, while the bad ones can make you feel every second tick slowly away. One of the problems for this meeting is that the speakers are given a whopping 25 mintues to tell their tales. At first I didn't mind so much, as the speakers would start off with some background thats new to me. By the 2nd session, the later speakers had sussed that speaker number one bore the burden of background, and had replaced their intro slides with more data. Wahoo.
Dave and Adriana spoke during the Evolution section, and both of their talks went well. Unfortunately, by this point of the day, the Chair was limiting questions to the speakers in a vain attempt to try to get back on schedule. I felt bad for Adriana as several hands shot up immediately after her talk, but no questions were allowed. The talk that followed was by Don Seto and was mostly about bioinformatics, so people used this time to ask questions about Adriana's work. The biggest was "Why does Ad4/Species E only affect military populations?" Not a surprising question given that every other talk had been about Ads B-D. Therein lies the answer to their question: everyone is still Ad4 niave when the enter training camp, although many have been exposed to the other Ads out their in the wild. Recruits are fresh fruit for virulent viruses.
I met Morris Jones today, an African-American Air Force member who works out of Travis Air Force Base north of San Diego. Our conversation started off a bit rough: I was curious if he was enlisted or contracted (he was wisely out of uniform despite protocol) and he gave me a momentary case of white-guy conversation paralysis with his response of "I'm the property of George W. Bush". (What do you say to that?? I said "Oh that's nice. (pause) I like football.") After that, we had a good chat at lunch about the DoD etc (turns out he's getting all the Affy equipment that used to be at AFIOH) and science in general.
It also turns out he's the one presenting the proposed discovery of a new gastroenteritis adenovirus (that's right, Serotype G, Species 52) that was found in the stool samples of an outbreak cluster in Los Angeles. At the poster session, the Adenovirus Police were on heavy patrol, and not entirely out of chest-thumping impulses, as you need to be rigourous regarding such claims. It was almost comical to see the disconnect from the 'scientists' from those on the medical side of things. They all asked a variation of the same question: "Why didn't you: A) take a blood sample; B) take repeated anal swabs; C) sacrifice and harvest organs from the affected patients?" Everytime Morris would patiently explain that by the time he got the grown monkey cells, those affected were long gone from the hospital, that IRBs frown on organ farming without the proper written consent and that there's really not much he can do about that.
Although the sequence is unique, Morris's proposed Ad species is phylogentically very similar to simian adenoviruses. Since it was cultured in monkey cells, the question arises if the source is truly human, or if it is the monkey used to make the culture cells. (It should be noted that Ad4 is also a lone-star adenovirus whose closest relatives are monkey-ads, and it has no problem affecting humans.) To help clear this up, Dave generously offered to eat the new adenovirus in the name of science and Koch's Postulates. From that discussion comes the title of this entry. I invited Morris to come give a Thursday talk at NHRC about his new Ad.
After the late-nite poster session, most of the attendees headed over to the local student pub to have a few brews and round out the evening. Everyone was grumbling about the meeting being a bit too ambitious (there was almost a riot at lunch as the extended session ended near the closing time of the cafe where free meals are provided.) Dave and I were joined by Wake Forest Dave and Paola from Argentina. Paola, a good friend of Adriana's, had given the final talk of the evening about Ad7H affecting children in Argentina. She'd done some sequence analysis and shown that the fatal cases all clustered into a unique group, so she was hot on the trail of finding lethal virulence markers. She told a really funny story of how her husband had joined her at the first meeting she went to after they had gotten married. The meeting was in Cancun, Mexico, during Spring Break. Thus, her husband had used up all their camera AND video film the first day of the trip. He has since offered to go with her to all other meetings. (He's home with the kids for this one.)
Tomorrow is Ad vector stuff. Dave promises to cover, while I'm heading to a local hike before the afternoon sessions start.
Thursday's program was scheduled from 9AM til 10PM. Given the windbagosity of any scientist provided with a chance to describe their work, or ask a question to show how much the know at the end of every talk, 10PM was a generous estimate at best. Today continued the entry session (over which there is a good deal of healthy debate) and led into "Replication and Host Cell Interactions" before ending with "Evolution". Like every meeting, there are good and bad talks. The good ones seem to whiz by, while the bad ones can make you feel every second tick slowly away. One of the problems for this meeting is that the speakers are given a whopping 25 mintues to tell their tales. At first I didn't mind so much, as the speakers would start off with some background thats new to me. By the 2nd session, the later speakers had sussed that speaker number one bore the burden of background, and had replaced their intro slides with more data. Wahoo.
Dave and Adriana spoke during the Evolution section, and both of their talks went well. Unfortunately, by this point of the day, the Chair was limiting questions to the speakers in a vain attempt to try to get back on schedule. I felt bad for Adriana as several hands shot up immediately after her talk, but no questions were allowed. The talk that followed was by Don Seto and was mostly about bioinformatics, so people used this time to ask questions about Adriana's work. The biggest was "Why does Ad4/Species E only affect military populations?" Not a surprising question given that every other talk had been about Ads B-D. Therein lies the answer to their question: everyone is still Ad4 niave when the enter training camp, although many have been exposed to the other Ads out their in the wild. Recruits are fresh fruit for virulent viruses.
I met Morris Jones today, an African-American Air Force member who works out of Travis Air Force Base north of San Diego. Our conversation started off a bit rough: I was curious if he was enlisted or contracted (he was wisely out of uniform despite protocol) and he gave me a momentary case of white-guy conversation paralysis with his response of "I'm the property of George W. Bush". (What do you say to that?? I said "Oh that's nice. (pause) I like football.") After that, we had a good chat at lunch about the DoD etc (turns out he's getting all the Affy equipment that used to be at AFIOH) and science in general.
It also turns out he's the one presenting the proposed discovery of a new gastroenteritis adenovirus (that's right, Serotype G, Species 52) that was found in the stool samples of an outbreak cluster in Los Angeles. At the poster session, the Adenovirus Police were on heavy patrol, and not entirely out of chest-thumping impulses, as you need to be rigourous regarding such claims. It was almost comical to see the disconnect from the 'scientists' from those on the medical side of things. They all asked a variation of the same question: "Why didn't you: A) take a blood sample; B) take repeated anal swabs; C) sacrifice and harvest organs from the affected patients?" Everytime Morris would patiently explain that by the time he got the grown monkey cells, those affected were long gone from the hospital, that IRBs frown on organ farming without the proper written consent and that there's really not much he can do about that.
Although the sequence is unique, Morris's proposed Ad species is phylogentically very similar to simian adenoviruses. Since it was cultured in monkey cells, the question arises if the source is truly human, or if it is the monkey used to make the culture cells. (It should be noted that Ad4 is also a lone-star adenovirus whose closest relatives are monkey-ads, and it has no problem affecting humans.) To help clear this up, Dave generously offered to eat the new adenovirus in the name of science and Koch's Postulates. From that discussion comes the title of this entry. I invited Morris to come give a Thursday talk at NHRC about his new Ad.
After the late-nite poster session, most of the attendees headed over to the local student pub to have a few brews and round out the evening. Everyone was grumbling about the meeting being a bit too ambitious (there was almost a riot at lunch as the extended session ended near the closing time of the cafe where free meals are provided.) Dave and I were joined by Wake Forest Dave and Paola from Argentina. Paola, a good friend of Adriana's, had given the final talk of the evening about Ad7H affecting children in Argentina. She'd done some sequence analysis and shown that the fatal cases all clustered into a unique group, so she was hot on the trail of finding lethal virulence markers. She told a really funny story of how her husband had joined her at the first meeting she went to after they had gotten married. The meeting was in Cancun, Mexico, during Spring Break. Thus, her husband had used up all their camera AND video film the first day of the trip. He has since offered to go with her to all other meetings. (He's home with the kids for this one.)
Tomorrow is Ad vector stuff. Dave promises to cover, while I'm heading to a local hike before the afternoon sessions start.
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1 comment:
I knew that had to be a Dave quote!!!
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