M E E T I N G
OVER LOAD Are too many conferences
ith a $1 million budget, Irv Wainer will oversee this month’s 26th In-
W
ternational Symposium on High Performance Liquid Phase Separations and Related Techniques (HPLC) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Wainer may also have a million reasons to worry. He and organizers expect up to 1,500 people and about 100 vendors. But Wainer, a researcher for the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, Md., knows that at least one vendor has canceled to go to Florida instead for the 50th Association of the Society of Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) conference in Orlando. That meeting is expected to draw more than 4,000 people during that same week. And some researchers who had thought about going to Montreal might change their itineraries for Florida’s warm weather, great golf courses, and family-friendly Disney World. ILLUSTRATION BY SIBYLLE SCHWARZ
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Also, MS is currently a big deal in the analytical world, so which meeting do you choose if your field is LC/MS? On top of that, dozens of conferences will be held this month in the United States and overseas by other academic and private organizations, such as the Gordon Research Conferences (GRC) headquartered in West Kingston, R.I., or International Business Communication (IBC) U.S.A. Conferences headquartered in Westborough, Mass. For Wainer, the wait to see how things will turn out at the HPLC meeting is unnerving. “I don’t think I’ll be not nervous until the meeting starts,” he says. Wainer isn’t the only one preoccupied with meetings these days. The number of conferences has ballooned so much that it’s left many in a dizzy. Researchers have faced the facts: As long as there is science, there will be scientific conferences, especially within the circles of analytical chemistry. But can there be too much of a good thing? Many complain that too many conferences overwhelm the very science that lures researchers to them in the first place. Meanwhile, some coordinators face stiff competition and costs as more conferences overlap and the number of attendees drops. Scientists find themselves weighing traveling expenses over the benefits of sharing and discussing science among peers. Such trends, say researchers, will lead to some conferences being “snuffed out”—and that isn’t such a bad thing, they add. The aftermath, however, may be more complicated as researchers and coordinators are controlled by the science that currently dictates the research market.
commercial conferences have grown faster than academic ones. “Academic meetings are just [concerned about] the science, … but almost all meetings, except a few, are commercial ones.” There are more conferences held in America and Europe than in Asia, he adds. Academic and commercial meetings have also overlapped each other, says Barry Karger, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass. “It’s harder to tell them apart.” Private organizers, Irv Wainer such as IBC U.S.A. Conferences and the Institute of International Research, have turned hosting conferences into an art. “You can make a conference targeting academics, and the same model can be applied to industry,” says Jim Wagner, Director of IBC Life Sciences. About 12 years ago, there were just a few companies organizing commercial meetings, and now there are dozens, he says. IBC was formed 25 years ago in England and runs approximately 3,500 events worldwide, including meetings and workshops on telecommunications, finance, and law. Of about 45 conferences held in the United States, as many as 30% have an international audience mostly from Europe, but there’s a “sizeable Asian attendance,” says Wagner. In August, IBC will hold its Drug Discovery Technology (DDT) conference in Boston. The conference is only eight years old and initially attracted just a couple hundred researchers, says Wagner. But when proteomic and genomic research grew, the conference drew about 1,000 people in 1998. Today, IBC is expecting more than 5,000. “We’ve changed our product a variety of times to suit our market,” says Wagner. Private organizers aren’t the only ones to spot trends. The International Symposium on Microscale Techniques (HPCE), which has attracted a little under 1,000 people in recent years, began as a meeting focused on capillary electrophoresis. Since redefining itself and its name, HPCE now parallels, to some degree, the annual International Conference on Miniaturized Chemical and Biochemical Analysis Systems, which will be held in Japan in November. “It’s the professional conference organizations that basically attract people who have no idea about the field … and give them an overview, which is perfectly okay, but that’s definitely a mon-
The proliferation of a lot of these meetings is be cause somebody?s going to make a buck.
Conferences and big business Conferences have become big business. And as in the world of big business, survival of the fittest is the rule of law. “Outside some of the society meetings, like the American Chemical Society [ACS] and so on, … the proliferation of a lot of these meetings is because somebody’s going to make a buck out of these meetings,” says Wainer. Kiyokatsu Jinno, a professor at Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan who plans to attend 11 meetings this year, says
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There are too many meetings, but it?s not like anybody is pointing a gun to your head and forcing you to attend.
eymaking exercise,” says Andreas Manz, a professor at Imperial College in London who also helped organize this year’s HPCE conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The meetings he finds attractive are academic ones where profit isn’t a factor. “It’s kind of a social aspect rather than money,” says Manz. There was a time when Joseph Loo, a professor at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA), looked forward to going to the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (Pittcon). Now, “I don’t enjoy Pittcon anymore,” says Loo. Pittcon has grown too large for him, he explains; and Loo, who shops constantly for the latest equipment, has noticed that the vendors he likes aren’t targeting Pittcon as much as before. He goes elsewhere, such as to the ASMS conference or the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF) meeting, which was held in Austin, Texas, during the same month as Pittcon this year. Loo and other researchers are choosing their meetings more carefully. “There are too many meetings, but it’s not like anybody is pointing a gun to your head and forcing you to attend,” says Loo, who is also a member-at-large on the ASMS board of directors. Loo’s wife, Rachel, a researcher at UCLA who—unlike her husband—did go to Pittcon this year, says she prefers the ASMS meeting. “It comes down to the topic, so I see myself as a mass spectrometrist first,” she says. Pittcon, like many other conferences, is facing the consequences of burgeoning science meetings held by academic, member, or private organizations around the world, especially in the United States. Pittcon, however, is still seen as an international mecca for exhibitors and conferees. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, a consortium of scientific associations, hosts the ABRF conference. In March, ABRF attracted approximately 1,200 attendees, about 500 of which were exhibitors, a small number compared with Pittcon’s estimated 24,000 or more attendees. Pittcon’s foreign counterpart, Analytica, a biannual conference held in Munich, Germany, has attracted more people but has had fewer exhibitors and American participants. In 2000, it had about 30,000 conferees—mostly from Europe and Asia—and approximately 1,000 exhibitors. “We welcome more American attendees, and we certainly would like to have them,” says Randi West, Senior Project Director at Munich Trade Fairs North America Corp. in Chicago, Ill., a subsidiary of
Messe München GmbH, the organizer of Analytica. But meetings, big or small, have their limits. In 2000, Analytical Chemistry reported that since the early 1990s, the ratio of conferees to exhibitors has been declining at Pittcon (1). A 20-year trend leading up to 1999 shows that the numbers of exhibitors grew, while those of conferees declined or stagnated. At its peak in 1987, Pittcon drew around 20,000 conferees and 10,000 exhibitors. In 1999, 16,356 exhibitors and 11,442 conferees came. This year, figures were 11,415 conferees and 11,904 exhibitors. Although the trend has raised eyebrows, organizers and researchers are confident the now 53-year-old conference is strong enough to continue drawing people. The fate of other conferences, however, isn’t so certain. Last summer at the Gordon Conference on Analytical Chemistry in New London, Conn., researchers and students interacted with each other wearing jeans and Hawaiian T-shirts and slept in college dorms, not fancy hotels. But only 65 people showed up. In the past, the conference has seen healthier numbers, around 100 or more, says Carlyle Storm, Director of GRC. Attendance at a GRC meeting is limited to approximately 135 conferees. According to Storm, up to 20,000 people attend a Gordon Conference each year, and GRC conducts up to 170 annual meetings per year that cover more than 300 subjects in the chemical, biological, and physical sciences. Forty-two meetings are scheduled for this month alone. Sometimes, GRC competes with itself. Last year in the United Kingdom, the Gordon Conference on Analytical Chemistry and the first Gordon Conference on the Physics and Chemistry of Microfluidics were held back to back in the same month. But the microfluidics meeting attracted 90 people, a much better turnout. Shrinking numbers at the Gordon Conference on Analytical Chemistry present serious operational costs for GRC, says Storm. That could spell trouble for the conference. “It’s nowhere close to paying its own way.” There are fears the smaller, more informal academic meetings that offer a better chance for young researchers to network and learn may be swallowed up by larger conferences that attract thousands and have standing-room-only talks. “I hope it’s just the opposite,” says Richard Caprioli, President of ASMS and a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. “I hope
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the scientists keep the small, informal ones.”
Why they go On a crisp October Monday afternoon, David Butcher wore his two-piece black suit as he frantically made phone calls from the Cobo Convention Center in downtown Detroit, Mich. Earlier, boxes of nametags and conference catalogues had been shipped to the wrong place, and hundreds of attendees were without research abstracts and identification for much of the morning. Thus was the start of a very hectic conference week for Butcher, Program Chair for the 28th Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS) and a professor at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C. The previous week, many of the scientists in Detroit had been at the Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS) in Atlantic City, N.J. Nevertheless, the FACSS conference attracted about 1,100 attendees, even after the terrorist attacks on September 11. By late afternoon, an exhausted Butcher grabbed a submarine sandwich and plopped its wrapped contents on a table as he sat in the center’s resting area. “There are a lot of conferences—there’s no question about that, and they are increasing,” he said. And researchers go not only to talk about the science but also to meet people and vendors, he added. What draws researchers and company representatives to conferences is as varied as the conferences themselves. “When you go to these [conferences], you really don’t go to the scientific sessions that much,” explains Wainer. “You’re going to booths, you’re going to the poster [sessions], and you’re networking.” The “publish or perish” mantra is a big motivator, explains Nancy Todd, Manager at the ACS Department of Meetings and Expositions in Washington, D.C. Instead of having two ACS national meetings a year, some people say there should be three, says Todd. But Ted Williams, a professor emeritus at The College of Wooster, Ohio, and former chair of the ACS Analytical Division, says having the first ACS meeting this year right after Pittcon “pushes the limits.” “What drives these meetings are academic presentations,” says Todd. In April, the ACS national meeting in Orlando drew more than 14,000 attendees, required 5,500 hotel rooms, and had as many as 75 sessions running simultaneously. The next meeting is in Boston in August. Researchers also attend meetings based on location, adds Wainer. “I have no doubt that a lot of people are coming to Montreal because it’s Montreal,” he says, referring to HPLC. For Europeans, it’s cheaper than going to the United States, and Montreal has a “European” feel to it, he says. Location has been a big factor for ACS and EAS organizers.
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In 1997, ACS hosted its national meeting in glittery Las Vegas, Nev. Commuting to sessions was difficult, and the city’s business community became less accommodating once it discovered a chilling reality about many of the nearly 9,000 ACS attendees: “Our members really don’t like to gamble,” explains Todd. Williams didn’t go for that reason. “It was terrible!” he recalls. “Everybody is still complaining about that meeting…. Las Vegas is a seedy old place.” EAS organizers have moved their conference back to Somerset, N.J., after hosting it for two years in the state’s gambling capitol of Atlantic City. The theme for this year’s meeting is “Returning Home”. Researchers complained that the move from Somerset, where the concentration of pharmaceutical companies allowed employees to easily attend sessions, to Atlantic City was inconvenient. “We heard it loud and clear when we were in Atlantic City,” says Mary Kaiser, President of EAS and a research fellow at Dupont Experimental Station in Wilmington, Del. “We lost a lot of those people who would just come for a day or two.” She adds that September 11 also affected conference attendance. In 1999, EAS attracted almost 4,900 people, with around 2,400 conferees. In 2000 and 2001, the years EAS was held in Atlantic City, the number of conferees was about 2,000 and 1,500, respectively. The number of exhibitors dropped from about 1,400 to 1,000, respectively. Last year, overall attendance was around 3,100. With the number of conferences rising, some researchers are also seeing an uncomfortable trend: monotony. “People are continuing to do the same meeting over and over again, with slightly different topics, but they’re all competing with each other,” says Wainer. “And they really dilute the scientific impact of it.” It gets boring when he can almost recite verbatim what a speaker is going to say, and he misses the days when conferences provoked scientific debate. Now, rarely does he see a fellow scientist challenge a speaker’s presentation. “Most of the questions are served up to be more like softballs,” he says. Manz also has experienced this. “Very often I was disappointed,” he says. “They invite glamorous companies to give talks and then it’s basically crap—total crap. But there’s not even a person in the audience to stand up to say that it is crap!” In the end, researchers come away disappointed after paying an expensive registration fee, he says. Money is another factor. Registration fees tend to be higher for commercial conferences. The August DDT meeting in Boston requires a registration fee of $1,699 for the main conference and $2,299 for the main conference and two symposia. The Gordon Research Conference on Medicinal Chemistry in New
If you?re invited and people pay the bill, then eventually you will go.
conferences. Globalization will London, N.H., also planned for eventually cut down the numAugust, requires a registration bers, says Wainer. He says refee of no more than $665. searchers in Singapore want Researchers can avoid high to host an HPLC meeting, fees by being invited. “You and they’re not expecting to have tons of meetings out see Americans. Scientists from there, and most of the meetIndia, Thailand, Australia, and ings I wouldn’t go to necesNew Zealand will attend, and sarily,” says Manz, who once vendors will notice this, says worked at Ciba Geigy, now Wainer. “If you’re sitting Novartis, in Basel, Switzerhere, and your basic clientele, land. “Being an academic, you which are the pharmaceutical may think that I go to more scientists, … is shrinking bemeetings actively, but in fact I cause of economics, and bedon’t. When I was in industry, cause [companies are] movI would go to one or two meeting … over to Thailand, then ings per year. At the moment, how long can you support it’s still the same; but on top these meetings that are essenof that, I’m invited to give tially large, expensive meettalks. That’s why I, in the end, ings in the U.S.?” go to 30 meetings per year…. Andreas Manz, Meanwhile, adds Kaiser, the The reason is that if you’re inwho attends about pool of chemists going to convited and people pay the bill, ferences is shrinking as rethen eventually you will go.” 30 meetings annually. searchers begin to retire early Industry traditionally reor seek new careers. stricts the number of conferAlso, say others, the popuences employees can attend. For lar science of today could bescientists traveling overseas, high registration prices coupled with traveling expenses can put come blasé tomorrow, and that will cause change. Private ora toll on any bank account. Although Jinno says he hasn’t had ganizers are aware of this and are watching what’s happening any problems traveling to the United States, he knows of oth- in proteomic research. Although biotechnology appears to be ers who do because of the financial costs and language barrier. very strong, Wagner says funding for research and development Some American and European researchers are reluctant to at- is increasing but the efficiency in discovering new drugs isn’t. “I’ve been sort of waiting for the fallout to happen, but that tend meetings in Asia for the same reasons. Ultimately, what draws crowds is popularity. Currently, pro- doesn’t seem to be occurring,” says Wagner. Another point is that organizations will see the economic teomics and genomics are making significant impacts on academic and industrial research. This has made MS popular too. and scientific advantages of combining conferences. Jinno says The ASMS meeting in 1982 attracted almost 800 people. In he would like to merge several meetings, such as HPCE, HPLC, 1992, the number soared to about 2,000. Now, 4,000 or more the International Symposium on Capillary Chromatography, and people are expected for the conference’s 50th anniversary. domestic meetings, into one or two. “However, some politics Around the same time, as LC matured as a technique, the HPLC will not permit us to do [that],” he adds. The situation caused by the increase in conferences is not so meeting’s attendance fluctuated. In 1988, numbers were about 1,900. In 1994, it was about 1,100, and it went back to around gloomy overall, suggest many researchers. Some say the exor1,900 in 1996. Since then, the numbers have gone down again. bitant number of meetings isn’t a major problem because they Last but not least, researchers go to a conference if they are so diverse. Therefore, dilution of ideas isn’t a concern. Anhave the time to go. “I don’t like to go to a lot of meetings be- alytical chemists are involved in many aspects of science, and cause then I don’t get any work done,” says Rachel Loo. maybe that’s the reason why so many conferences exist and overlap, some say. “In one sense, there are more meetings,” says KarChanging strategies ger. “On the other hand, there is also the issue … that we’re more According to Karger, a member of the International Scientific part of the larger community.” Committee that founded the HPCE conference in 1989, change And that, says Karger, is a good thing. will lure researchers to conferences. “These meetings have to keep responding to the times and bringing new things in,” he says. Cheryl M. Harris is an associate editor of Analytical Chemistry. “Otherwise, if you keep doing the same thing, … you always get References a core of a few hundred [people], and that’s it.” Researchers have suggested several conditions that will affect (1) Erickson, B. E. Anal. Chem. 2000,72, 192 A–196 A. J U N E 1 , 2 0 0 2 / A N A LY T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y
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