So here I am at the International Congress of Genetics in Berlin. It’s the 20th installment, as neatly reflected in the conference logo – a pair of chromosomes spelling XX in Roman numerals. Using biological imagery to pun…there should be more of this sort of thing.
Because the conference is held only every five years, its origins are much older than the double decade suggested by the title. In fact, it dates back to Victorian London. The Royal Horticultural Society hosted the first meeting in 1899, decades before the word ‘genetics’ was coined, with an emphasis on plant hybridisation. I’m going to have to look this up when I get back home.
This is the first time the ICG has convened in Germany since 1927 (which itself was a postponement – Berlin had been selected to host the 1916 meeting, but WWI got in the way). After the 1920s, things went rapidly downhill for German genetics, reaching an horrific nadir under the Nazi regime (Martin covers this in a bit more detail). It took many years for the discipline to recover, but strong progress was made following the founding of the German Genetics Society in 1968. Now, Berlin is proudly welcoming geneticists from around the globe to the pre-eminent conference for geneticists.
The International Conference Centre is a monumental structure – its brutalistic hulk could make a good service ship for Battlestar Gallactica. The interior decor hasn’t changed in decades I suspect. Everything is in that charming 1970s futuristic style that you don’t see so often anymore.
Into this building, 2000 of the world’s geneticists are convening; among them six Nobel Prize winners. The six-day conference includes 54 symposia 9 plenary lectures, a keynote symposium and the usual miscellanea of workshops, poster sessions and satellite meetings. The organisers have tried hard to get a good mixture of speakers, and one delegate noted that 30% of the symposia chairs are female. (A situation partly engineered by the steering committee who admitted that their first pass was too male, too old and too North American). The typical delegate is also hard to describe; researchers in their early twenties are as numerous as those of more advanced age and seniority, again something that the organisers specifically aimed for.
Nobel laureate Oliver Smithies set the stage at the opening press conference. To paraphrase his remarks, “You can never tell what’s going to happen at an international congress. Most reports take us only a little further in knowledge. But every now and then, there’s one person who goes a little further than the rest. They are the ‘jumpers’. And I hope to see a few jumps at this conference.”
More soon on the scientific programme…