No, I don’t work for the Boston tourist bureau. But I have lived in the area just long enough to know that a beautiful day in winter is cause for celebration. And three beautiful days in a row, well … it can be tough to stay inside a convention center.

The convention center’s huge windows overlooking the city don’t make it any easier. It’s another gorgeous sunny day, and I’m looking down on one of my favorite Boston neighborhoods. It’s filled with quirky stores and cafes and bars, but best of all, right next to the convention center is the prestigious Berklee College of Music. I’m in awe of Berklee – at least one of my favorite musicians flunked out of there and a few, I think, actually managed to graduate – and I love seeing the young musicians sulking around the neighborhood, hauling cellos and guitars on their backs and oozing ‘brilliant but misunderstood’ from every pore.

But it’s time to head in to hear Angela Belcher talk about engineering using biomaterials. She assured me the talk would have plenty of pretty pictures, so I’m optimistic that it’ll be worth staying inside to hear it. And I’ll come back to blog about something other than the weather in just a bit.

One of today’s career workshops centered on a topic that many young scientists don’t think about until it’s too late: how do you plan your first research laboratory? No, I don’t mean the research plan – you’ve all been obsessing over that for years. I mean planning for the stuff: the incubators, the chemicals. the centrifuges, the Erlenmeyer flasks. The enormity of the task may have crossed your mind already when, say, you realized that the incubator you thought nothing of cost the same as your yearly salary.

The workshop was lead by Victoria McGovern, a senior program officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The first step, she advised attendees, is to sit down one night and critically evaluate whether you want to pursue a career in research. She urged everyone to be honest with themselves, but cautioned: “you may need liquor.”

McGovern also suggests that you take a little time one weekend to make a list of every item you think you need to run your own lab. Then, the next time you go into lab, only allow yourself to use the things on the list. How long do you think you’ll last?

(The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has a great guide on how to make the postdoc-to-faculty transition. You can find it at https://www.hhmi.org/resources/labmanagement.)

The conference kicked off Thursday evening with a plenary lecture by David Baltimore, the Nobel-prizewinning biologist, former president of Rockefeller and Caltech universities, and current president of AAAS. You know, a real underachiever kind of guy.

While wearing his AAAS president hat, Baltimore’s main job has been to choose the theme for this year’s meeting. This year, it’s “science and technology from a global perspective.” And the opening lecture was a quintessentially Baltimore offering: cerebral, far-reaching, but also thought-provoking.

Drawing on his recent travels in Africa, India and elsewhere, Baltimore tackled the science and technology perspectives on the Tom Friedman notion of the world being flat. While the US has fallen into a state of highly nationalistic rhetoric since 2001, he argued, the rest of the world has begun moving far beyond it. India is channeling its education expertise in its Indian Institutes of Technology, and beginning to outsource its own outsourcing…simply because it can. Europe has regrouped and begun powering ahead as an economic engine, while the US “has allowed itself to become mesmerized by the terrorist threat”. He saved his choicest words for President Bush, slamming him as “criminal” for allowing the NIH budget to drop over the past five years in terms of real buying power. “The president must believe himself immortal or in the hands of God to decimate this,” the most powerful engine for driving science and medical advances in the world, Baltimore said.

It must have made things a bit awkward for the next speaker: Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. Kagame spoke warmly of meeting with Baltimore and getting his advice on such topics as how to foster institutions of excellence when resources are limited. But Kagame also has to fly back to Rwanda tomorrow, to get ready for a meeting with … President Bush.

Which do you think better approximates a human being: disembodied human cells in a Petri dish, or mouse cells in a live, sniffling rodent?

A multi-institutional collaboration has been formed to find out. The US National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency announced today that they will try to determine whether computer models, cell cultures, and zebrafish can replace mice, rats, and guinea pigs in toxicology tests.

They’ll start by treating cell cultures with chemicals for which animal toxicity data is already available, to gain a sense of how well results from the two systems match. The shift to cell cultures promises several advantages, including high speed. Christopher Austin, director of the NIH Chemical Genomics Center, says their labs can test 2500 chemicals at 15 different concentrations in a single afternoon using cell cultures. Testing the same number of chemicals in animals has taken thirty years, he said.

But you cannot abandon animal testing overnight, cautioned Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health. The agency officials declined to estimate when their comparisons would be complete.

The first session of the day was a discussion about the use of cloned animals for food. The topic has been simmering for years, but finally came to a head last month when the US Food and Drug Administration declared the food from cloned animals and their progeny safe, much to the consternation of some US congressmen.

The panel issued the usual assurances: no, Dolly will not be served for dinner. At about $13,000 a head, cloned animals are far too expensive to use for their meat. They’ll be used for breeding instead. Industry reps pointed to the advantages of cloning for harvesting useful genetic traits and achieving consistency in their breeding lines, but Patrick Cunningham from the University of Dublin undercut that argument by estimating that roughly 3/4 of the variation out on the feedlot is environmentally induced, not genetic.

Cunningham brought up another point that isn’t often broached. Allowing cloned animals opens the gateway to the next step: genetically engineered animals. Industry researchers are already hard at work (and have been for years) trying to create goats, for example, engineered to produce a drug in their milk. The technology is still far from perfect, and don’t look for this to become an issue immediately. But it’s out there, sitting on the horizon.

I’m going to venture out on a limb and guess that February is not peak tourist season in Boston. Sure, Boston is the logical place for a science extravaganza like the annual AAAS meeting. The city can’t be beat for the sheer concentration of high quality science (both in Boston and in Cambridge, its scholarly neighbor across the river). But oh, those Boston winters! So dismal and cold.

But today is glorious: beautiful blue skies and a bit of a chill, but not so cold that I had to break out the big puffy coat that makes me look like a 5-ft tall (American) football player. The meeting has only just begun and hardly anyone is here, but surely the good weather will set an optimistic tone – if anyone manages to sneak out of the cavernous interior of the Hynes Convention Center to get a little sun.

It’s not unusual for Noble prize winners to put in an appearance at the AAAS meeting, but this year’s meeting also featured a few Oscar winners as well. In one of the final sessions of the conference, Doug Roble of Digital Domain, filled us in on some of the secrets of designing special effects for blockbuster movies.

Roble listed some of the ways that computer animators try to make their animations look realistic. They use satellite imagery and the latest atmospheric models, he said, and they’re always culling through scientific journals in search of new information. Still, the drive for scientific accuracy has its limits. “It doesn’t have to be totally accurate,” says Roble. “If it looks good, it’s right.”

“I would never ever fly in an airplane that had been designed using my animation,” he added.

Glancing through my notebook on the last day of the meeting, I was embarrassed to see page after page with flowers and odd geometric shapes sketched in the margins. But doodlers need not feel ashamed, says Mimi Lam of University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “Everybody does these things absent mindedly to think,” she says. Right – that’s why I did it. To think.

Lam has been looking at the quixotic carvings on ancient hominid artifacts like the parallel scratchmarks on a 1.4 million year old bone fragment found in the Kozarnika Cave. Are they art? Symbolism? No, says Lam. They’re meaningless doodles, perhaps comparable to a bear leaving his mark on a tree by scratching its trunk. At best, she said, the marks could be a sign of ancient hominids honing their hand-eye coordination.

Well, if those are doodles, I have to hand it to the doodlers. It’s one thing to doodle with pen and paper. It’s entirely something else to go to the trouble of chiseling your doodles in stone.

Medicine’s long held obsession with the white male has certainly not come to an end, but it does seem to be lessening over the past few years. More and more, we’re finding that therapies originally tested on white men don’t necessarily work well for members of the opposite sex or other races, and scientists have been trying to work out why.

In today’s session called “Genetic Targeting of Drug Therapies”, Esteban Burchard of the University of California, San Francisco discussed differences in how Latino populations respond to the popular asthma medication albuterol. He found that Puerto Rican kids were less likely to benefit from the drug than Mexican children, and has been narrowing in on some of the reasons why.

It’s always striking how tough these studies are, given so many confounding non-genetic differences in environment, diet, and economic class. But when Burchard set out to determine the genetic origins of Latino ethnic groups, he found another complicating factor – how do we really know what race we belong to, anyway?

Burchard found that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans populations differed in the proportion of genetic regions that came from African, Native American, and European lineages. Mexicans, for example, had more regions that were similar to Native American genotypes. But if you looked at individual members of his studies, the variability in genetic makeup was astounding. For example, some participants who insisted that they were Puerto Rican were 100% European, while others were nearly 100% African.

Burchard says he’s developing statistical methods to incorporate that data into his analysis, but one conclusion is clear: “We don’t really know who we are,” he said.

The bioterrorism frenzy in the US tends to focus on glamorous pathogens like smallpox and anthrax. But Jacqueline Fletcher of Oklahoma State University worries about more obscure threats like “Karnal bunt” and “citrus canker”. Though they aren’t as well known, unleashing those plant pathogens could cost the US millions in higher food prices and lost trade. And quickly catching a plant disease in the over 1 billion acres of crops, forest, and rangeland in the US won’t be easy.

Protecting the nation’s plants against bioterrorism isn’t exactly sexy, and Fletcher’s accustomed to spending a fair amount of time justifying the need to protect plants. Today she started out with a historical approach, highlighting plant disasters from years past, like the Irish potato famine of the 1800’s that sent waves of Irish immigrants to the US. And ever wonder why so many Brits eschew coffee in favor of tea? Thank the coffee rust epidemic in the mid-1800’s that wiped out coffee supplies.