ViennaBios - Lessons from a conference

I spent last week in Vienna, the last destination of a series of travels this semester, before heading back to Greece for the holiday. The official excuse, was the ISMB/ECCB conference (which will be understood by bioinformatics geeks only but seriously the rest of you do not need to know!) And amazingly enough the conference was indeed the place where I spent most of my time while awake. Apart from its huge size in all aspects (participants, parallel sessions, exhibitions, 1000 posters etc) it was particularly interesting in a a number of ways, not all having to do with Science. I 'll postpone writing about Vienna for another post (or maybe another journey) and stick to the lessons a young (and lets admit only marginally promising) scientist can get from a conference.

Lesson #1: (As in most sectors of human activity) the people who really matter are most likely the ones who have been around for quite a while.
They are in general under-dressed, have awful haircuts, horrible powerpoint slides (they actually do not use overhead projectors because they are not allowed to do so) and use old-fashioned vocabulary. They are also wiser, wittier and more clever than the average speaker, they do not talk crappy-fashionable-scientific-voodoo-buzz-words all the time, have a wide knowledge of the problem they are dealing with, are more interested in questions than in answers, finish their talks with more criticism than perspective, use the language in a better way. Strangely (or not) they tend to have a totally different background than most of the attendants of the conference. Not surprisingly they have little or no impact on young researchers who carry on doing their thing...
And that is the non-optimistic lesson!

Lesson #2: Class battle exists in science
I had the chance to attend two talks by the same person given on the same day, on the same subject, to different audiences. the first one opened with an impressive introduction, carried on under flashes of photo cameras and ended with the presentation of an award for the speaker, which -as the organizers kindly informed the puzzled audience- left no time for questions. A couple of hours later, the recently awarded young scientists had to face a wave of criticism and really hard questions from a suspected audience who did not really care about awards or not forming part of this special cast of awarded, or invited speakers. To me it looked that what was was under criticism was, apart from the presented work, the whole system of evaluating scientific work through impact factors and k-indexes. It appeared that a great majority was somehow pissed at being steered by an arbitrary, self-acclaimed, scientific avant-guard, which decides what is worth it and what is not, not only when it comes to scientific answers but -and that is dreadfully WORSE- scientific questions as well.
To the unsuspected, innocent young post-doc I am, it really looked like scientific class battle of the best kind.
And that was the optimistic lesson!