Last Thursday, Nature introduced its latest Essay series with an Editorial (Nature 455, 137-138; 2008):
"Creative ideas are not always solo strokes of genius, argues Ed Catmull, the computer-scientist president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. Frequently, he says, the best ideas emerge when talented people from different disciplines work together.
This week, Nature begins a series of six Essays that illustrate Catmull's case. Each recalls a conference in which a creative outcome emerged from scientists pooling ideas, expertise and time with others — especially policy-makers, non-governmental organizations and the media. Each is written by someone who was there, usually an organizer or the meeting chair. Because the conferences were chosen for their societal consequences, we've called our series 'Meetings that Changed the World'."
The first Essay, on a topical subject in the week in which the Large Hadron Collider began operation, is Paris 1951: The birth of CERN (Nature 455, 174-175; 2008), when François de Rose chaired the meeting that founded Europe's premier facility for experimental nuclear and particle research. Here he relives the five days of drama that changed the world of physics.
The Editorial continues: "When we began to think about commissioning this series, several difficulties arose. First, we were looking for more than the traditional scientific conference, and it was notable how few of the twentieth century's world-changing meetings had involved scientists taking a lead. As a list emerged, we were faced with another problem: time had sadly depleted the pool of writers. This week's author, for example, is among the few surviving members of a group that met 57 years ago.
The six events that made the final cut took place on three continents and span five decades, from 1951 to the dawn of the new millennium. They represent the twentieth century's promise, and two of its greatest threats. And they illustrate a period in history when scientists felt they should raise a collective voice to advance the public good. The six meetings have something else in common. In wanting to change their world, the scientists involved needed and obtained the support of governments and, in some cases, the media."
There are, of course, other candidates for the title of Meetings that Changed the World. And our illustrious attendees' opinions are, of course, personal and often provocative. Readers are invited to have their say, and suggest their own favourite Earth-shaking meeting, at Nature Network. One, or rather two, suggestions have been made by Daniel Greenberger: "a very important conference just after the second world war was the Shelter Island conference on high energy physics, which discussed the newly discovered elementary particles, and such new phenomena as the Lamb shift. This conference determined the direction of high energy physics for a generation. A similar, first-ever, conference that took a field that did not even exist yet to the point where the principals started seriously considering it, and subsequently started a revolution, was the MIT conference on quantum computing, held in 1980."
