A moveable feast

The ASCB Annual Meeting follows a peculiar calendar all its own. We always meet in December between Thanksgiving and Christmas when hotel rooms and convention halls are cheaper. But we are at the mercy of the Great Turkey and FDR’s long ago edict that Thanksgiving would be the fourth Thursday in November. Thus the ASCB can start as early as December 7th (which we did in 2007 in Washington DC) and end as late as December 17, which is awfully close to Christmas. That’s the case this year. Ho, ho, bio.

The ASCB Meeting also spins around its own axis like the great astronomer Ptolemy’s nested series of celestial globes. We always start on Saturday but there are no posters and few presentations on Saturday. The keynote is a big draw on Saturday evening but Sunday is the first “real” day of the meeting with posters up, the Exhibit Hall open, and talks, talks, talks, and more talks.

It’s also when the Public Information Committee holds its first “Ten AM Press Briefing.” The PIC (a.k.a. The Pick) puts out a “press book” as a guide to the meeting for science journalists. The ASCB meeting is all about presenting papers. This year, members submitted 3,451 abstracts (scientific talk for the boiled-down versions, which are a sort of a “coming attraction.”) Of these, 1,043 authors asked that their papers be considered for “platform presentation,” which means the author thought highly enough of the data that he/she thought it might qualify for a spot on a mini-symposium panel. Only a fraction of the 1,043 will actually get a slot on a panel but the PIC uses that as a marker for the author's good opinion of the paper. 

We form screening panels—five this year⎯to blast through all 1,043. This year every abstract passed before five sets of human eyeballs. Then we ranked our choices, winnowing that down to 150. We screened, voted, and ranked again. We ended up with 11 top picks which we call “Novel & Newsworthy,” meaning that in our humble and rushed opinion, these are the most interesting, most newsworthy, and coolest papers at the Meeting. This doesn’t mean that ASCB is endorsing these abstracts, only that we think these are worth looking at more closely.

I will be blogging each day’s Ten AM Press Briefing, reporting on some of what was said at the press conference and posting the relevant press book “story” from “Cell Biology 2008.” The stories are “embargoed” against publication, meaning that reporters are given early access to the stories, abstracts, and background material but can’t publish, broadcast or web post anything until the day the authors present. So today we will have the Sunday abstracts.