Beer with the Worm Guys in the Badger State

Zero blog posts last week- I apologize! But it was a crazy week trying to get experiments done, because I had to take off on Thursday for the annual C. elegans meeting in Madison, WI on Aging, Metabolism, Stress, Pathogenesis, and Small RNAs! I thought maybe I would have time to write on my trip- but no way. A 4-day constant deluge of awesome talks (mostly on topics directly or indirectly related to my own research), meeting tons of people, no sleep, and yes, partying and enjoying the city. I spent a majority of today debriefing myself on the meeting and following up on e-mails, and I'm only about 1/3 done. I consider this my official induction into the Worm community.

Madison is a beautiful cosmopolitan city. Campus is integrated into the bustling cityscape similar to Harvard's Longwood campus, except in a much more efficient and relaxing way compared to the mess in Boston. There are numerous student-friendly areas (completely absent from Harvard/MIT imho) reminiscent of Ann Arbor's bars and cafes, except with far more choices. Like Ann Arbor, it has a disproportionate amount of culture relative to size. The State Capitol is sandwiched between two lakes, and about half our conference took place at the Memorial Union which is right on the larger lake.

During dinner and other breaks we would sit out on the Terrace listening to live bands, watch the boaters and swimmers enjoying the wonderful weather, and drinking Wisconsin's signature beer along with a thousand other people (you can buy beer everywhere all the time in Wisconsin). The other half of our conference was at the brand new Union South, and like many of the newer campus buildings, it was way nicer than anything I've seen at Harvard, MIT or Michigan. I wandered into the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery and found myself wondering: why don't we too have fancy bars, numerous fountains and a froyo place right in the lobby of our lab building? Madison is set up as an intellectual's dream city.

It was incredible - this meeting motivated me like nothing else since I started working in a C. elegans aging lab a year ago. The whole experience was a blast, but one thing really pumped me up:

Getting to know my peers. I always thought hydrogen sulfide research was awesome, and now I get to party and schmooze with the very same people who did that work! Almost surreal - especially when we started jumping in the lake at 4am. Watching the distinguished professor from Germany do the Twist in hot pink pants at the dance party didn't hurt either. Science is hard work. Benchwork can become lonely, and reading a zillion papers can become really abstract. Without a face and without knowing if you'll ever meet them, it's hard to think of the authors of papers you read as real people. What better way to motivate yourself than to meet the research community? It's only rational- we are social animals. Feeling connected to people who authored the papers you read really helps you feel connected to the research itself, and it helps you appreciate opposing viewpoints. But I've found I love the worm community, with its social dynamism running contrary to all societally-imprinted misconceptions of scientists as awkward and anti-social.

Everyone at this meeting works on related problems (aging/longevity/epigenetics) in the same system (C. elegans). Which means that all of the long-standing mysteries in the aging literature that have fascinated me for years were addressed in some way at this meeting. These are the very people working and solving these problems. Being one of the first people to hear even the partial solutions to these mysteries has made me fall in love with the field all over again. Even if I had a massive hangover while listening to all the talks.

Lastly, I was nicknamed "creepy and delicious"- and yes that was affectionate.