While attending these conferences one picks up a lot of funny snippets during the talks. Some samples.
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If you are a biologist who uses NMR to study proteins and are visiting a different country to work in a collaborator's lab, never tell the border security that you intend to enter the country to do some work with "nuclear" magnetic resonance imaging. That little word could land you in a lot of trouble at the airport.
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You come across a lot of interesting people at conferences. There is a scientist who originally wanted to become a pig farmer before straying into lipid biology. Then there is someone who swam to escape East Germany. But the one case I found most interesting is the scientist who did her PhD in planetary sciences looking at Jupiter before she shifted to studying the role of fatty acids in cancer biology. The largest molecule she studied as a grad student had 5 atoms. Now she studies systems made up of thousands of atoms.
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At this conference I learnt of a molecule called Coprostenol. It's derived from cholesterol and is used to detect faecal contamination in water, food etc. Wiki page here. The meaning of its name is interesting. It's derived from Greek.
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During breakfast one day, I was sitting across from a senior professor. He claimed to be someone who reviews research papers a lot. According to him, one can get a sense of which way the center of the research world is moving from the number of papers one receives for review from each country. Keeping that in mind, he said, he's been lately receiving a lot of papers from Chinese researchers but rarely ever from India. This discussion was in the context of whether the government is putting enough money into research and the ease of finding an academic job.
