Meetings That Changed The World
sara abdulla
Monday, 08 September 2008 09:50 UTC
Following last week’s piece on the birth of CERN, Nature’s six part series on scientific meetings that changed the world continues with an essay on Asilomar, the 1975 conference that safeguarded the future of GMO research.
Each of these six essays is written by an expert who attended the conference in question. The authors recall what it was like to live through these momentous occasions, and reflect upon the events’ broad and lasting legacies. Obviously our list is not the final word. There are other candidates for the title of ‘meetings that changed the world’. And our illustrious attendees’ opinions are, of course, delightfully personal and often provocative.
What do you think?
Updated 18 September 2008 09:13 UTC
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Replies
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User removed
CHANGES IGNORED BY THE MEETINGS. Although some meetings have resulted in changes in the world many changes have been ignored by the meeting even though the world eventually changed in the same way. For example, aging in bacteria was reported in the 1997 American Society for Microbiology meeting and later published in both English and Chinese in a premiere scholar journal Science in China in 1999. But that ground-breaking change is still neglected (sometimes intentionally) by the mainstream which actually accepted similar “discoveries” later. Another thing that was totally ignored by the mainstream meeting-goers is the report of a fundamental aging mechanism in the 2006 third International Conference on Functional Genomics of Ageing. The reprot was not only rejected for inclusion in a special issue of a mainstream journal covering this meeting but also “forgotten” by the meeting-attended authors who published papers later in some “top” journal on the same topic and stated sometimes even the same things. To see more such examples, please visit TRUTHFINDING CYBERPRESS (Shi V. Liu, SVL@logibio.com)
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I believe in the idea because it allows today’s scientists to work in the perspective of the human benefit along the time to come knowing that their appraisal may not be hop-close. Unfortunately, and as the ineluctable time has always taught us, until being categorized under a “meeting that changed the word” its proponents may not be able to enjoy the changed world’s gratitude. I think it remains to identify the parameters of changes that would accredit a meeting under the honorary category.
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This is a reply to the editorial “Brave New World”,Nature 455, 137-138 (11 September 2008) | doi:10.1038/455137b; Published online 10 September 2008.
While there is no doubt that the conferences you have focused on have changed the scientilfic world through their governmental and funding consequences, there have also been seminal conferences that have changed the scientific landscape by introducing and discussing important new ideas.
To mention just two of them in my own field, in both of which many of the principals are already dead or dying, a very important conference just after the second world war was the Shelter Island conference on high energy physics, which discussed the newly discovered elementary particles, and such new phenomena as the Lamb shift. This conference determined the direction of high energy physics for a generation.
A similar, first-ever, conference that took a field that did not even exist yet to the point where the principals started seriously considering it, and subsequently started a revolution, was the MIT conference on quantum computing, held in 1980, sponsored by such people as Fredkin and Toffoli, and featuring such seminal ideas as Feynman’s thoughts on computing. From this grew everything else.
These were the early Solvay conferences of our time.
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