On live-tweeting at conferences

Nature News has an interesting piece on another novel aspect of the collision of 21st century social media with 20th century scientific culture, this time related to the phenomenon of live tweeting from scientific conferences. The piece talks about a meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) which in its latest annual gathering asked social media enthusiasts to seek permission from speakers and poster presenters before live tweeting material from the meeting. As the piece indicates, many of the attendees were rather unhappy about this.

I can personally relate to the pleasure of live tweeting from a conference as I have been guilty of this sin several times. In fact I believe that there's no getting away from it in the Age of Social Media. The most recent instance was when, egged on by our spirited colleague Peter Kenny (aka "slayer of druglike metrics") a group of us participated in gleefully live-tweeting the Gordon Conference on Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD). Now Gordon Conferences are supposed to be "private" in the sense that they are supposed to be forums for dissemination of unpublished data. But as far as I could vouch, at least 90% of the work in the conference was material that I had seen or heard before. My colleagues seemed to concur.

Basically here's what it boiled down to when we decided to tweet the CADD GRC

1. The conference chair did not object. 

2. 90% of the talks were based on material that was already published or presented. 

3. In all our tweets we were careful to separate the messenger from the message. In addition we refrained from tweeting when someone explicitly referred to unpublished material. 

Also, a lot of the tweets referred to reiteration of aspects of the field that are well known, although many are underappreciated and therefore in fact deserve to be highlighted. This point deserves emphasis. There's a lot of underappreciated wisdom in every field that, while not well-known, is crucial to the progress of that field. A good example in computational chemistry and modeling would be the use of statistics which has been woefully under-appreciated until recently. Thus, every time someone referred to the proper use of statistics or the lack thereof, it was a point worth sharing with the broader community.

4. As always, "when in doubt ask for forgiveness, not permission" - Grace Hopper.

5. In an age of crowdsourcing and massively interdisciplinary problem solving, it's not just a bit elitist but impractical and outdated to declare any public meeting as opaque to public inquiry. I believe that withholding information from a public conference goes against the spirit of science in the 21st century. This point is thus also a plea against the traditional guidelines for Gordon Conferences which restrict dissemination of information; guidelines which as indicated before seem rather futile in the face of a preponderance of already published or presented material. As science changes, conference rules need to adapt.

All this being said, I think it's important to respect someone's wishes if they wish to keep their presentation confined to the people in a conference room and explicitly request the audience to do so. In that case I will grumble but acquiesce. As I mentioned, in the CADD GRC I was careful not to tweet material that was explicitly marked as unpublished (although again, this amounted to a vanishing fraction of the total material). 

On the other hand, I think it would be absolute folly to insert an injunction against tweeting along with those against taking photographs in the official guidelines for any conference. For one thing, a picture is worth a thousand words so a photograph can convey much more than a tweet. Secondly, tweets in a sense are no different from notes that one might take in a conference: would we expect an injunction against sharing these personal notes with our colleagues to find even an iota of support? Then why the pushback against tweets?

Live-tweeting along with the other paraphernalia of social media is here to stay. Whatever my negative feelings about outrage and public shaming on twitter have been recently, there is no doubt in my mind that live tweeting from conferences is a net positive to the global scientific community. At the very least it will make up for the blot of public shaming on twitter, which wouldn't be a bad thing at all. So, if tweeting be the food of appropriate conferencing, play on!

Gordon Conference impressions

What goes on at the Gordon Conference stays at the Gordon Conference, goes the saying. In keeping with this tradition I am not going to divulge the details of the science at my very first medicinal chemistry Gordon Conference. But that should not stop me from offering general comments and holding forth on some of the non-scientific aspects of the meeting.

The conference is always held in some scenic place; if you can convince your boss you could possibly make it to Lucerne, Switzerland or Milan, Italy, otherwise you might have to be content with traveling to one of the many small resort and college towns in New Hampshire. But have no fear; all these towns offer their own very scenic views and crystal clear weather.

The one big truth about the GRC is that it's all about interacting with people. The medicinal chemistry conference was in New London, NH which is the home of Colby-Sawyer College; this has been the venue since 1944. We were lucky to enjoy spectacular weather during the entire week. The conference is deliberately located in a small location away from the bright lights of a big city so that there will be minimal distractions and participants can spend most of their time together. The interactions are amplified by having all participants stay together in one of the suites in the college dorms (with separate bedrooms and common bathroom space); take advantage of this fact and do get to know your roommates.

What really makes a Gordon Conference unique is the schedule. Mornings and evenings are filled with talks and poster sessions but afternoons are free. It feels a little strange at the beginning to attend talks from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM followed by poster sessions until 11:30 PM but you get used to it. The poster sessions are where the most stimulating interactions usually happen, so you should definitely not miss these. The posters are also where the most interesting new information is divulged, so unlike the talks, you won't find copies of these reprinted in the folder which you get on the first day. In general you will find people sometimes saying things off the record, with the honest expectation that you won't divulge these details to the outside world.

One thing that becomes clear at a GRC is that there are people in their 60s and 70s who have been attending GRCs for decades. Naturally they are good friends and tend to hang out together. If you are a first timer you might be slightly overwhelmed by what seem to be cliques, but one thing you would find out is that even the old timers are quite welcoming. Go ahead and introduce yourself to them and you will very likely end up having interesting and lively conversations. This is especially true during meals where you may often end up at tables with strangers, many of whom will hopefully be friends and colleagues by the end of the meeting. The one thing you should not do at a GRC is to keep to yourself since it sort of defeats the whole purpose of the conference. Plus, how are you ever going to get to know people if you never start?

There is some kind of physical activity - hiking, kayaking, horse-back riding, cruises, soccer games - scheduled for every single afternoon. You can either join in or relax in your room, but joining in is strongly encouraged. I went on a hike and a walk and had a very productive conversation with a medicinal chemist from the UK. Even if you are more of the indoor types like me, don't miss these activities and the resulting conversations. It's your best chance to network and make connections.

Interestingly, a corollary of all this is that in one sense, the formal talks are the least interesting aspect of the meeting. Don't get me wrong; some of the talks were really great and all of the talks covered a very diverse smattering of topics, but the overall scope and content of the talks mirrored that at other good meetings. Most scientists know that the most valuable conversations are the ones that occur outside formal talks, at the bar and during lunch and dinner, and the Gordon Conferences underscore this fact more than any other.

Which brings me to the food. You should avoid the Gordon Conference like a plague if you are trying to diet and lose weight. The GRC knows that scientists - who are still harboring traumatic memories of their time as graduate students - are suckers for good food. With this in mind the organizers put out a spread every day like no other I have seen at a scientific conference. There's an omelette station at breakfast and stir fry station at lunch. There's a different dessert for every meal and six different flavors of ice cream. Soda and chocolate milk flow like water. The poster sessions offer endless rounds of pizza and drinks. And you are surrounded by all this pretty much 24/7. You get to eat so much roast beef and lobster and mushroom ravioli that by the end of the week you are actually hungering for simple fare like oatmeal. Oh wait, they have four different kinds of that too...

The end result of this gastronomical and scientific cornucopia is a bunch of extremely well-fed and intellectually stimulated scientists. In this case, the talks themselves mirrored the astonishing diversity of medicinal chemistry (the topics are publicly listed so there's no harm in talking about them). It's interesting that even today, when you meet someone who calls themselves a "medicinal chemist" he or she is most likely to be a synthetic organic chemist. But I am a modeler, and yet I consider myself first and foremost a medicinal chemist. As the scope of the med chem GRC reveals, a conference on medicinal chemistry today includes all kinds of people; synthetic chemists, biochemists and molecular biologists, pharmacologists, chemical engineers, molecular modelers, physical organic chemists and even doctors. The list of topics ranging from pain to high-throughput screening and from drug delivery to antibody-drug conjugates makes it clear that at this point in time, "medicinal chemistry" essentially includes almost every discipline that could have an impact on drug discovery and development. Another thing that's evident from the list of speakers is the focus on biology; a lot of the talks are about biological assays and gene knockouts and target validation and synthetic biology. In keeping with scientific trends, it's clear that medicinal chemistry conferences henceforth are going to include a healthy amount of biology.

Overall the conference was very satisfying and stimulating. I think it's safe to say that in the end we all went away with a renewed appreciation of our discipline and of the good cheer and spirit that exists in our ranks in spite of today's troubled times. Most importantly, I think all of us were inspired to go back to our labs and computers and get on with the science and business of designing drugs, an endeavor that has real impact on real people's lives every single day. If you haven't been to the med chem or any other GRC I would strongly recommend it.