A wrong turn in Vienna
15 Dec 2011 by Evoluted New Media
In his new column, Russ Swan cuts a swathe through pomp to find out what's what in science and R&D. To kick off, our intrepid babble discovers a conference can hold more in store than seminars and poster sessions.
It started, not with a babble, but with a roar. Full-throated and very nearly harmonious, two dozen voices raised to full volume as the chant began.
Bizarrely, given the noise, you could have heard a pin drop. Sort of. We were at a scientific conference, and we expected to hear about the latest advances in drug discovery and medical diagnostics. Not this.
Not this what? My first thought was that it was a haka, the traditional Maori war. Even somebody as ignorant as I am about sports was aware that the rugby World Cup was in full flow that week. Perhaps the All Blacks had scored some decisive victory, on the other side of the world? Perhaps there really were that many Kiwi delegates, huddled around some TV or smartphone, waiting for the opportunity to revel in their country’s sporting success?
That couldn’t be it. For a start, the group just didn’t look right. They all sported yellow t-shirts in what was clearly a coordinated protest of some sort.
But what sort? The chant that rose and echoed around the lofty vaults of the Hofburg Palace, once the very focal point of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now a plush conference venue in the heart of Vienna, gave no clue. It wasn’t German, and it certainly wasn’t English. For all I knew, it might have been Maori. For all I knew, it might have been Martian.
We’d come to the city for Planet xMap, a conference dedicated to the development and application of Luminex bead-based assays. This is pretty much at the cutting edge of molecular biology, and seems to be finding ever more ingenious applications.
An area that I find particularly interesting is personalised medicine. We’ve all heard the hype about the Dan Dare future, where our individual chemistries will be used to determine the specific medications that will work for us. Chemotherapy drugs that effectively kill cancer cells in some patients will be ineffective – and often dangerous – in others. There’s toxic that kills you, and there’s toxic that makes you better. Only one of these is desirable.
The xMap system adds thousands of micrometre-sized beads to an assay, colour-coded with a combination of dyes to make up to 500 unique bead types. These microspheres are treated with appropriate receptors and reporters so that, once reacted, the specific bindings and responses of each bead type can be determined through a laser excitation process. It is a technology so clever it seems close to witchcraft, and which effectively enables each well of a 96-well assay plate to play host to up to 500 individual experiments. No wonder they call it the art of multiplexing.
None of this provided any clue to the nature of the disturbance, though. By now a hundred or so of Austria’s finest Polizei were also in the Hofburg, and a peaceful stand-off ensued while the protestors made their point. And finally we got the first clues to what that point was.
The protestors were Kurdish, and were demonstrating to have one of their leaders freed from prison. But why go to so much bother to tell us, a random group of scientists and journalists, about it?
Perhaps the name of the conference misled them. Wars are fought over lines on maps, and this gathering was called Planet xMap. Did they think they were drawing the attention of a group of eminent cartographers to their cause?
Later that day, after the protest had dispersed and we had all resumed our discussions, I think I discovered the answer. Entering the Hofburg, the conference venue is straight ahead. An inconspicuous steel door, slightly hidden on the right, bears a small placard: “OSCE - Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe”. This “offers a forum for political negotiations and decision-making in the fields of early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation”.
A simple wrong turn on the way into the palace meant that the protestors’ message was delivered to a group of bemused scientists, rather than the political arbiters they were aiming for. If only they’d brought a map.
By Russ Swan