Fifty and Fifty

I remember fondly the first time I attended a Gordon Research Conference: it was the Lipid Metabolism Conference in the summer of 1969. At the time I was working as a postdoctoral fellow with Eugene Kennedy, who had discovered the main pathways for the biosynthesis of phospholipids. The department of biological chemistry at Harvard Medical School had many faculty and students who were interested in various aspects of lipid metabolism and frequently attended this conference. Many were then or later became leaders in the field.

The Lipid Metabolism GRC first met as the Blood Gordon Conference at Kimball Union Academy in 1955. The conference actually emphasized lipids more than it did blood, so it was renamed Lipid Metabolism in 1956. It has just reached its fiftieth anniversary. Interestingly enough, Kimball Union Academy was first used as a conference site in 1954, so the academy has also just had its fiftieth anniversary as a GRC site. The academy site, however, has since been replaced by the Waterville Valley Resort. Having attended Gordon Conferences at Kimball Union numerous times over the past thirty-five years, I will miss the country store that marks Meriden, New Hampshire; the beautiful views of rolling green hills; and the swimming hole by the covered bridge. But I will not miss the hard prep-school mattresses; the spartan, hot rooms; or the communal bathrooms.

The Lipid Metabolism GRC was always attended by the leaders in the lipid field. Nobelist Konrad Bloch and Eugene Kennedy were regular attendees. A lectureship named jointly after these two close friends and vanguards of the lipid field was established at the 2005 conference, for which the inaugural lecture was given jointly by Nobel laureates Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein, both of whom have participated frequently in the Lipid Metabolism GRC.

I have vivid memories of the earliest conferences I attended, where vigorous debates occurred on subjects ranging from the validity of Arrhenius plots to the mechanisms involved in fatty acid synthase. On one occasion Salih Wakil, the biochemistry chair at the Baylor School of Medicine, and Roy Vagelos, then biochemistry chair at Washington University School of Medicine, had a shouting match about the role of acyl carrier protein in the synthase. The young turks of that time–Bill Lennarz, Armand Falco, and C. Fred Fox–urged them on. In those days the meetings were held in a hot, stuffy gym where participants had the choice of sitting on uncomfortable folding chairs or just outside the entrance door on the porch where you could hardly see the ancient black-and-white slides. Fortunately, by the 1980s Kimball Union had built a new air-conditioned conference room.

In 1988 I had the pleasure of serving as vice chair and in 1989 as chair of the Lipid Metabolism GRC. Topic emphasis alternated between lipoproteins in the even years and lipid enzymology in the odd years, but the conference was separated in 1997, with Lipoprotein Metabolism meeting in the even years and Molecular and Cellular Biology of Lipids meeting in the odd years.

In the past decade it has been widely recognized that in addition to their traditional roles in membrane structure and energy metabolism, lipids and lipoproteins also play important roles in cell signaling and in most diseases. As a result both conferences should continue well into the future to become two of the longest-standing GRC meetings. As always, I look forward to presenting the latest work of my research group at the next GRC.