"In all of my career, a scientific meeting only meant one thing: a series of talks. So when I was invited to this meeting in New Mexico, I assumed that this would be a similar story. But here I was, listening to the opening remarks and still having no idea of what we would be doing during the 3 days that we were together. All I had were cutesy titles for scheduled events like “Call to Action,” “Incubation Walk,” and “Research Karaoke.” Honestly, it sounded like a kinder garden."
"Slowly, I saw that behind this flaky-sounding schedule was a novel idea: In a regular meeting, when the talks are over, you bump into a colleague, and you start talking. What I take away from those short conversations is often more than what I learn from the long series of talks. Here, the radical idea was to jettison all the talks and focus only on the short, one-on-one (or small group) conversations."
"Each conversation was with a scientist who often had a very different area of expertise. There would be a behavioral neuroscientist talking to a virologist or an imaging expert talking to a neurophysiologist. We might not share the same toolbox, but we had the same goal."
