Today I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting between Senior-Adviser and a visiting speaker. I’ve been looking forward to this speaker for some months– I’ve got an entire folder devoted to articles from his lab on my computer. His questions are similar to mine, but in a different model system. Anyway, the conversation was completely fascinating! I could have been a happy fly (pun intended) on the wall in that room for hours. Unfortunately I never managed to participate. It moved a little too quickly, and segued in a direction where I had little to contribute. Hopefully the speaker didn’t make any comments on my total silence when he met with Adviser-Prime later in the afternoon (in the past, people have asked Adviser-Prime if I’m autistic.)
I mostly interact with Senior-Adviser at the level of day-to-day methods, so it can be easy to forget his amazing perspective on the intersections of evolutionary and molecular biology.
I’ve had some very good interactions with visiting scientists in the past- they don’t always end in awkward silence. It’s always slightly bittersweet. I’m almost 100% sure I’m leaving research when (if) I finish the PhD. I’ve got less then two years left, and I know I’ll miss the sense of being on the cutting edge, and the privilege of meeting luminaries in the field. I realize ‘luminaries’ is a bit pretentious, but it’s difficult to think of a better term for people whose labs are metaphorically defining the current face of evolutionary and molecular biology.
The speaker’s actual talk was also quite good, and covered an amazing amount of ground. It wasn’t what I expected– he’s breaking into some different model systems, with enormous potential implications. He was also a very practiced, accomplished speaker. Some scientists do important and interesting work that they can’t effectively communicate– definitely not the case here. I’ll probably blog more about that in a future post.
Funniest moment was when he was talking about a high risk experiment that required “$60-70,000 in transgenics”, and Adviser-Prime audibly whispered “holy shit!” The speaker agreed that if these experiments hadn’t produced a useable result, it would have been a “very sad day”. Between the two of them, it got a pretty good laugh.
Science Pilgrim 