More Christmas Lagniappe December 21, 2000

This'll be a short column this week. Probably a lot of you won't even read this until the start of the new millennium. (yes, I am one of those who feel that, if we are going to use the present Western calendar, then the start of the new millennium should be 2001. After all, that is why Kubrick and Clarke used that as the name for their movie and not 2000!)

I will be out of town the first week in January. I will be at a meeting - The Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing on the Big Island. It is a wonderful location for a meeting but those lousy organizers set it up so poorly that they have sessions going on all the time. Especially ones that I really want to see. Not like those meetings in the Rockies every winter where they just about force you to go skiing every afternoon. And then provide free alcohol afterwards before the evening sessions. Nope, we just get day long meetings. But we get to wear shorts and brightly colored shirts. I do not really expect anyone to feel sorry for me.

One thing I like about this meeting is that it really tries to anticipate where things are going. The organizers actively seek out forward-thinking scientists and let them do the actual corralling of speakers. In fact, anyone can propose a topic for future meetings. If they decide to go with it, you get to organize the session. Could be a great way to get an expenses paid trip to Hawaii while adding to your cv.

This year there will be sessions on Human Genetic Variation and its Implications for the Clinic; the required session on the Protein Folding Problem (a perennial favorite); High Performance Computing for Computational Biology (a great session title. I mean, what other sort of computing would you use?); and Bioethics, Fiction Science, and the Future of Mankind (I have to attend this one just for the title. I mean, what if they DO know what the future of Mankind REALLY is?).

Anyway, the meeting proceedings are actually the best part. They are fully refereed and are just like real publications - they are cited in all the databases as if they were papers. So, there are usually several excellent papers in the proceedings from people that do not actually attend. If I was smart, I would just pick up the proceedings and pretend to go to the sessions, cribbing from the book in case any of the other Immunoids attending asked me questions. (Yes, my big mistake was discussing this meeting last year. Seems that there are now several other scientists attending. Why, oh, why can't I keep my mouth shut!)

I will be attempting something forward-looking and futuristic myself. I am taking along my Powerbook and my digital camera. My plan is to upload meeting reports, with pictures and maybe even Quicktime movies. So, starting January 2, I will try to provide you a true virtual meeting experience. I have done all of these things individually before. I even remotely wrote and published an edition of the Discovery Researcher when I was in Washington, DC. (I'll let you guess which one). So keep your fingers crossed.

This sort of thing is done all the time. There is a great site that chronicles the scientific adventures of a group exploring the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was on the research ship, Atlantis, out of Wood's Hole that was exploring an unusual structure called the Atlantis Massif, a large 'mountain' rising 5000' above the rest of the sea floor.

Exploring this site was like one of those old TV specials with Jacques Cousteau's narration. They used an underwater submersible to explore the ocean floor. There were regular updates but the December 12th one is really exciting. They found something that was totally unexpected.

Several of the people on this crew were involved previously in exploring the 'black smokers' off the Washington Coast. These are thermal vents on the ocean floor spewing out iron/sulfur-rich water at over 350 °C. These vents had a tremendous variety of animal life around them and provided exciting evidence of the ubiquity of life.

The Atlantis expedition found something else. They found a large hydrothermal vent area but of a very different nature. Instead of iron-rich, high temperature water they found much cooler water (71 °C) and no iron, mostly carbonate. There were spires, like stalagmites, several hundred feet tall. The type of animal life found here, the sorts of bacteria isolated, will be very different from other areas. No one had even imagined anything like this.

This web site was able to capture the excitement of a totally unexpected discovery. Where this new information will lead us, who knows. But it is another indication that there is such a tremendous amount of knowledge still out there. We just have to be ready to find it, wherever and whenever it becomes available. I'm just hoping my expedition to Hawaii can have just a small amount of that excitement.

I'll see you in the next millennium. Have a wonderful Holiday.