That's a Lot of Speakers

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's "Biology, Society and the Future" event yesterday celebrated 75 years of symposia at the lab. The day kicked off with Sloan-Kettering's Charles Sawyers discussing how personalized medicine, though without that moniker, has been slowly making its way into cancer treatment. Then the National Geographic Society's Spencer Wells discussed his involvement with the Genographic Project, which has taken about 55,000 samples from indigenous and traditional groups as part of its global DNA sampling project, to understand the patterns of diversity seen in humans. Later in the day, the Innocence Project's Peter Neufeld discussed how advances in genetics have helped his group exonerate 254 incarcerated people, 17 of whom were on death row. Then Craig Venter spoke about his new synthetic genome was 15 years in the making — Richard Roberts said in his commentary that this was a modest talk coming from Venter. Finally, James Watson made a few remarks to wind the day down. He said that a great problem in science is getting grants, though that is "not our limiting factor." Rather Watson says the problem is "how to fit intelligence into big science" and how to reward those smart people. The symposia, though, brought "back very many happy memories," Watson said.