So: I've just arrived in Austria, where I'm the guest of three scientific institutions--or at least their postdocs: The Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI), the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA), and the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), all of them comprising the Campus Vienna Biocenter. Vienna clearly prides itself on its support of the life sciences, and this campus is the center of it all. So far, I've just gotten here and am a bit groggy, but at least architecturally, the place kind of reminds me of MIT. I'm not here for research--the postdocs are taking a retreat to Lake Balaton in Hungary (above) and I am providing some, er, intellectual entertainment. It might be along these lines. Other speakers will be Carl Djerassi, the chemist, author, and playwright who contributed to inventing the birth control pill, and Charalambos Kyriacou, a University of Leicester behavioral geneticist who studies, among other things, sex and agression in drosophila. Postdocs are just about my favorite people in the world (fun, optimistic, scientific) so this should be quite a blast. Blogging may be light--we'll see. If anyone has recommendations for what to do in Vienna, let me know!
