Long Beach Biophysics All Stars, Day 2

I realized that although I brought, and have been using, my camera and spare batteries, I'd neglected to bring my USB cable for uploading photos. This means I can't post any photos from the conference until when I get back to Baltimore this weekend. Not that there's a whole lot to see; the sunsets are pretty, but if I tried to take pictures of the talks or posters they'd throw me out by the collar. So goes intellectual property.

Woke up early today at 7:30, though really it was 10:30 by my East Coast biological clock. Mikhail had already been awake and swimming in the heated outdoor pool(!?).

I went to a lot of talks today. The upshot of not having any concrete research interests yet is everything seems fascinating, and I walked from one symposium to another every half an hour or so. The downside is one always feels obligated to be listening to one talk or another, not to mention having to decide what to attend when several very interesting things are being presented simultaneously. As I sat in the talks, I noticed all the people around me scribbling notes on the presentations; these people probably had fixed areas of research already, and sat in one symposium on their chosen topic all afternoon actually getting inspiration for experiments and projects from the presentations, as opposed to people like me, who flit around to whatever's interesting and am able to stop at the fascination, and thus preserve it, if only for a while. Oh well. It's a luxury, to not have to worry about how things I'm interested in actually relate to the work I'm currently doing, but I don't suppose I'll have it much longer, so it's OK, perhaps.

I heard one talk about how gramicidin S promotes the activity of other antimicrobial peptides by reducing membrane flexibility--very relevant to the paper Mikhail and I wrote. I heard another about the structure and formation of pathogenic protein aggregates, implicated in everything from mad cow disease to Alzheimer's (coincidentally, two diseases I'm actually somewhat terrified by). There was a presentation concerning using molecular dynamics simulations to probe the structure of antimicrobial peptides, though that was surprisingly unexciting--equilibrate an initial structure in bulk water using Monte Carlo simulations, add lipid molecules and get the final conformation using MD, etc.; nothing particularly shocking. During the questions session one guy was very pushy about informing the presenter, a master's student from Toronto, that she would be able to scan a much longer time scale for one of the derivative peptides if she'd started with a helical structure instead of the solvated conformation (which made sense to me, since she equilibrated the initial structure in water), which was rather annoying to me. A Swede presented a bunch of computational data on the prediction of macromolecular binding structures, which went right over my head.

I feel somewhat frustrated that so much effort in computational biology right now seems to be going toward proving that computation can yield biologically relevant (i.e. in agreement with experimental) results at all; I'm waiting for this proof of concept phase to conclude already, since that will be when the real fun starts. Right now, the accumulation of data is so outpacing the theoretical comprehension thereof it's rather macabre from my perspective; people show off slides and slides of graphs and diagrams only to conclude with a handful of tentative, qualitative declarations. Meanwhile, theorists struggle simply to prove their own relevancy; but without them, how would any data be relevant, or relevant to the extent that it could be? Dialectics and disconnect once again.

Went to lunch with Izzi at a burger place across the street. It's actually very easy to keep up a conversation with her. We talked about whether it was OK to drink beer at 3PM (I questioned her decision to do so, while admitting that I was drunk in a North Ave. alley in the late afternoon over the summer, but rationalized it by saying I was at Artscape), the fallacy of health insurance, the impossibility of getting any decent psychiatric care that didn't involve getting pills jammed down one's throat at a university, the unbearable misery of med school courseloads, etc. We parted and then met again at the end of the talks, hung out at the bookstore where my mother called in a rather awkward moment making sure I wasn't continuing to have a breakdown, and then she left to meet up with an old friend, who she eventually confessed was someone she'd dated long distance while she was still in college. Shit. That put a real twist in my plans. Or rather, it would have, had I had any plans. Which I did not. Really.

It turns out it takes two hours to get into Santa Monica. So I probably won't see Ben until Tuesday or Wednesday. That's fine. I've waited three years; what's three days?

Tonight I went to the Irish pub across the street (the "Auld Dubliner"--unoriginal even for an Irish pub name) with most of the people from the lab, and Ingo, who is from the Max Planck Institute in Germany and who supervised Shannon while she worked there over the summer. The cost of living (drinking) here is ridiculous--I'd never paid six dollars for a Guinness stout before. Well, I paid $5.50 for one back in Cleveland, but then glass was two feet tall. That's Long Beach, I suppose; it's basically a monstrous Inner Harbor, a jumbo tourist trap. Anyway, Edwin makes some rather inappropriate comments once he got a couple tumblers of Bailey's in him. The place served some delicious Irish beef stew boxty. I introduced the word "Kafkaesque" to my colleagues while describing my typical restaurant-going experience, and Edwin and Jesse wouldn't let it go the rest of the night. On many occasions I actually had to correct them when they were attempting to use the word to describe a situation that was not, in fact, Kafkaesque. Somehow Mikhail, Edwin, Jesse, Ingo and I ended up in the lobby bar of the Renaissance hotel in what might be the very first true "dudes at a bar" moment of my whole life. I knew when Jesse started pondering what one's girlfriend would think if one asked her when their anniversary was that it was time to go home and sleep. (On a side note: what would be the proper response to such a question? As usual, I tend toward a tentative "it depends.")

Moral of the story? Scientists eat, too. And drink. A lot, sometimes.