Notes from the biomass

GCB 2007, Germany’s annual bioinformatics conference ran from Wednesday until yesterday. This year it met in a conference hotel in Potsdam and saw 180 participants, mostly researchers located in Germany.
People from institutes in Potsdam and our department at the MPI for Molecular Genetics were organizing the conference, and which ran very smoothly both in terms of the program and the organization. My favourite key note by Yitzhak Pilpel, who is studying general mechanisms of the cell, such as translation one a cellular scale by mixed bioinformatics-experimental approaches, is my most noteworthy discovery. Contributions to the conference are aimed to come from PhD students and younger Postdocs rather than initial presentations of ground breaking research. What surprised me most this year was the high quality of the presentations. It would be nice if all talks at major conferences where as thoroughly prepared as those of the average student at this year’s GCB.

Still, it occasionally receives loathing for not comparing to focused workshops or international conferences, mostly from people who don’t seem to enjoy networking and expect presentations to be unique entertainment. You can hear similar criticism from the same people on the ISMB. While I was disappointed by the conference in earlier years, too, the previous GCB I attended, 2005 in Hamburg, was already a conference worth going to. GCB 2008 will take place in the Museum of Hygiene in Dresden, which appears to be a much more interesting place than what it sounds like and I hope that I’ll find the time to go.

Sounds like the malaise is in other places at the moment.

Career opportunities certainly make on of the worst topics for ones blog, please excuse a little meta-whining here. Job situations are discussed in every coffee break and at every conference dinner and I hear a lot of complaints about the career prospects for postdocs and young PIs in Germany. Many of them very much sound like Tony Hyman and Kai Simmons (not at all young researchers trying to make their mark) in the current Nature’s jobs section.

Until a couple of years ago I have disregarded the complaints from colleagues as statements that one would hear in every lab on the planet. I changed my mind in the face of the problems that many talented (as in more talented than me) friends and colleagues have with the system and compare the number of their offers from in the US vs the ones in Germany. Most of the German researchers that return to Germany (or stay) do so because of their partners and kids, not because the research situation is attractive anyway.

The German system (and likely other European systems) need an overhaul, not only for the “elite researchers” that politicians (and the authors) are concerned about but also for mundane researchers. I know, people in academia who are not in the top 10% and older than 30 should work in industry - I hear they can’t wait for people that have failed in one career path - but the lack of long term perspectives for non-tenured researchers is unlikely to increase the attractivity for the Uberscientists too. In the age of high-throughput research, it will be very important to have a number of technologists and academic specialists around that can support their family even if the 27 year old Harvard alumnus always gets the first position on the paper.