THE GAZETTE
A Poster's TravelsAfter editing, cutting, pasting, measuring, re-editing, re-pasting, and grumbling a few not-so-polite words at me, Patti finally packed me up and stuffed me in the stewardess' baggage compartment. Off we flew to New Orleans ("nawrlins"), Louisiana, for the 1997 Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting. By our arrival on October 27, over 25,000 participants had already registered. Patti somehow forgot to mention to me that this was the largest scientific meeting in the world! I was really nervous, but Patti was even more so, since she would be doing all the talking. She left me in the hotel room for a day and went to scope out the meeting. After only half a day, I think she realized the futility of trying to see everything - simply impossible! Vendors hawked the latest and greatest technology, new research posters flooded the two-football-field-sized floor every four hours, and ideas were swapped like baseball cards. She was a bit keyed up that night, so she left me in the hotel room (again) and went to dinner with her coworkers in Dr. Leslie Tolbert's lab, then skipped off to Bourbon Street for a few hours of REAL jazz. I was feeling ignored, so we spent the wee hours of the morning together gluing the corners of my pictures (undone by the humidity) and polishing the edges of her talk (undone by anxiety). Next morning: presentation day. I posed as best I could while Patti talked about Manduca sexta Fasciclin II, a molecule which appears to play a role in guiding axons to their target locations in the brain during development. I heard quite a few compliments about my pictures of antibody perturbation experiments, 3-D reconstructions, and in situ hybridizations. By the end of the session, we had met scads of interested scientists with informative suggestions. What a fantastic time! Just after, we munched some beignets ("benyays"), packed up, and headed home. I can't wait to do it again, so I'll see you all (y'all) at the UBRP Conference in January! (Who's bringing the jazz band?) Patti's poster for Patricia Eckholdt, UBRPer in Dr. Tolbert's Lab, ARL- Neurobiology The University of Arizona 22 September 1997 bender@u.arizona.edu
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