Day three of a meeting is always the low point and for reasons best known to the organisers, the meeting continues on Saturday and Sunday. After two days you have met up with all the people you haven’t seen for a while and had a good gossip and bitch. At this point guilt sets in about those unmarked exam papers, unreviewed papers and grant proposals that have stalled mysteriously. You become part of the army of people seareching for the power socket near the wireless zone to compulsively check e-mails and send messages back to base.

The talks have been the usual mixture but at least the keynote and plenary speakers have all made a great effort and given good overviews of the field and set out a roadmap for the future. I have been pleasantly surprised by the average quality of the other talks but there have been a sprinkling of really bad ones. Unfortunately none that are so bad as to be hilarious. There are a couple of the compulsive question askers, the sort that are present at all meetings and who feel it is their divine right to address every speaker.

I am not a card carrying member of this community so I try and observe what appears to be a discipline without roots; not really in the physical sciences and not really in the life sciences. There are vey few people I would term real biologists here but lots of medics. The materials people are a mixture of great names with really innovative ideas and some handle turners.

Despite my misgivings about the field it is certainly seen as a fertile one for publishers. Elsevier has two journals on show plus three or four others. Springer are nursing a wounded journal and give an unimpressive presentation trying to explain why they have slipped in the perception of the community. They also lose points when it is revealed that their reception is soft drinks only after their guest of honour asks for wine and then beer from the staff and is refused. The IoP is in on the bandwagon with a stall and a relatively new journal, the RSC has a rep who I meet and she tells me that Nature has someone roaming the halls. Even the Royal Society has a stand and is marketing its Interface Journal. I am surprised at this, I had always thought the Uk’s venerable academy were above such things as marketing. Anyway their journal appears to be one that publishes difficult sums and not one I am likely to grace with my work.

This congress does not work as well as the meetings organised by the Materials Research Society but it is similar to other Biomaterials conferences I have attended. It is hard to put a finger on what is not working. Perhaps it is because I like to leave a meeting with ideas for new directions of research and I haven’t heard anything here to make me sit up and think.

Well there is one more day to go so I may yet get my inspiration.