Infatuation with Decadence and Science

My infatuation with the Gordon Research Conferences began in 1989 when I was a postdoctoral fellow in Pete Pedersen’s laboratory at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. David Garboczi (now at the National Institutes of Health [NIH] but then also a member of Pedersen’s lab) and I had decided to leave Sunday morning from Fell’s Point in Baltimore and drive to the Holderness School in New Hampshire to attend the Molecular and Cellular Bioenergetics GRC. The plan was to arrive before dinner and the evening session. As the number of traveled miles and the number of ingested rice crispy cookies (which constituted our diet for the day’s trip) increased, the idea of dinner became more and more appealing. Fortunately, we made it on time. There we were, having dinner and talking with the “names” we only knew from the literature! The opportunity to listen to and converse with Har Gobind Khorana, Robert Huber, John E. Walker, and Paul D. Boyer, to name a few, was an incredible treat for someone just trying to figure out if she would fit into the world of science.

Admittedly, I had the more immediate goal of learning the decisive news on membrane proteins and how to tackle their overproduction (or simply at that time their production) in the bacterium Escherichia coli and in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (otherwise known as baker’s yeast). Clearly, if we were to get to the heart of the matter of transporters and enzymes, we would need material to work with, and the solution appeared to be the overproduction of recombinant proteins.

After the session on Sunday evening (a relatively early night) and back in my dormitory, I remember marveling at the decadence of the site: trickling shower water, more cold than warm; toilets separated by mere curtains; a mattress with clearly identifiable springs; and a single light hanging from the ceiling of the room I shared with another young postdoctoral fellow. Somehow it took me back to my days of camping as a child, which delighted me, and I felt inexplicably comfortable in this new environment and certain it was going to be a great week.

And a great week it was. The lectures were wonderful, as were the questions, the heated debates, and the poster sessions that followed. I was trying to take in as much as possible, but more than the knowledge and information, it was the atmosphere in which they were transmitted that I found astounding. The accessibility of renowned scientists amazed me; the intensity of some of the arguments and discussions, combined with the ability to laugh, surprised me; and the long hours that extended into the night of talking about science or philosophy, exchanging lab protocols, and venting about our own last frustrating experiments made me realize how similarly investigators operate, how the achievement of goals unites them, and how universal science is.

I have attended several other Gordon Conferences–such as Chemistry and Biology of Tetrapyrroles and Enzymes, Coenzymes, and Metabolic Pathways–and they have all lived up to my first GRC experience. Their modus operandi remains the same and so has my enthusiasm for them. Now an independent investigator, I am a regular participant in the Tetrapyrroles GRC, and I am always excited to learn about new developments in the field, see old friends, and watch with pleasure the burgeoning of new scientists.

Through nearly two decades we have gone from being able to isolate and purify the enzymes involved in the synthesis and degradation of heme, to cloning of the genes encoding these enzymes and the determination of their three-dimensional structures, to developing model therapy systems for porphyries and identifying the role of tetrapyrroles as signaling molecules in various cellular processes. Gordon Conferences have facilitated progress in this field by fostering an atmosphere conducive to the exchange of ideas between established and new investigators from a wide variety of scientific disciplines.

I owe to Pete Pedersen my initiation into the GRC experience, to the GRC my growth as a scientist, and to the Chemistry and Biology of Tetrapyrroles Conference, in particular, the respect of my colleagues as a scientist.