Saturday morning, Saturday evening.

The fly-casters are back. Walking to my first ASCB Annual Meeting in 2000, I noticed all these other people confidently striding toward the convention center with what looked to be fishing rod cases strapped to their shoulders. Was there another meeting at the center for fly fishing enthusiasts? I soon discovered that the tubes contained tightly-rolled posters, not fishing tackle. 

This morning, the anglers/scientists were back on Howard Street in San Francisco, heading for the trout streams of cell biology that will flow through the cavernous Moscone Center for the next five days. Across the street in the other half of the Moscone, the American Geophysical Union will open its fall meeting on Monday. I wonder if I'll be able to spot the geologists by the rock hammers hanging from their belts. The ASCB is a Big Meeting. ASCB is expecting 10,000 attendees--scientists, students, press, exhibitors, and assorted dignitaries. But we're dwarfed the the AGU which routinely draws 15,000 to its fall meeting. 

Interestingly enough, geophysics and biology are drawing closer together as the effect of life on Earth and vice versa becomes more critical. One of the intriguing papers at ASCB is from Dianne K. Newman's "geobiology" lab at MIT. Her lab is focused on how ancestral bacteria on the early Earth evolved the ability to metabolize minerals. What might have seemed a purely academic question has led Newman and Lars Dietrich, a postdoctoral fellow in her lab, to new insights into the opportunistic infection that is the leading cause of death among the 30,000 Americans with cystic fibrosis. Dietrich will be presenting on Tuesday, so check back for more details on how genes can have different "purposes" in different organisms. Science aside, Dietrich has taken some striking images of bacterial colonies of Pseudomonas aeruginosa that he has been disrupting by gene silencing. More on those later. 

I type from the bowels of the Moscone Center where messengers come in from the outside to tell me how cold it is on the street. Well, cold by San Francisco standards. Soon I will go up the Moscone escalators to the vibrant streets of downtown San Francisco. How many American cities still have crowds of Christmas shoppers packing the downtown streets after dark? Recession or no, people here are shopping. 

Walking back to my hotel in the cold dark, I will have to push through the excited crowds outside the FAO Schwartz displays. Union Square is festooned with lights. A temporary skating rink in the park offers the intoxicating mix of ice and hot chocolate. Walking, I will think of lost cities and ghosts of Decembers past. Geologists, biologists, and window gazers, we've all come to SF for new wonders.