Starting Out on the Fringe

I have attended Gordon Research Conferences for so long that I cannot recall for certain which one I attended first. I believe I started out at the Inorganic Chemistry and Organometallic Chemistry Gordon Conference. I remember that there were many men and very few women at the early conferences. (I recall being one of only two women attending one conference, and our beds were in the air-conditioned infirmary instead of in the hot and humid dorms–who could complain about that?) More memorable, however, were the excitement and the intensity of the discussions about science at lunch, in the afternoon, and late into the night. As a young scientist I was enormously inspired, even if by the end of the week thoroughly exhausted, by these experiences.

Oddly, it was a Metals in Biology Conference that I did not attend that had the biggest impact on my re-search career. As a student I loved inorganic coordination chemistry, particularly the compounds with beautiful colors. I had no interest in biochemistry then; moreover, bioinorganic chemistry was unknown to me at the time. In the early 1970s, when I was an assistant professor at Rutgers University, I was looking for something new to work on, and so I called on my friend Tom Spiro for advice. He had just returned from the Metals in Biology Gordon Research Conference, where biochemist Irwin Fridovich had reported a strange new copper-containing enzyme he called superoxide dismutase. Knowing that I had studied metal dioxygen complexes, Tom suggested that I study the reactions of superoxide with metal ions and complexes. That conversation set the course of my research for at least the next thirty years. As my interests became more biologically oriented, I started to attend the Metals in Biology GRC, which rapidly became my primary conference. It was the birthplace of bioinorganic chemistry (short for biological inorganic chemistry), a field now so big and so well-established that it is difficult to believe it was “on the fringe” in its early years and even antedated the popularity of interdisciplinary research.

Considered neither fish nor fowl, we bioinorganic chemists started out making model compounds, but soon we branched out into the study of biological molecules themselves, despite the fact that most of us had little or no biochemical training. In those days the only conference where I really felt at home was Metals in Biology, not only because of our common research interests but also because of the substantial number of women who participated in this meeting from its inception.

Recently I discovered that going to a Gordon Conference in a field I have never explored is a great way to become knowledgeable in that area. It is like learning a new language by total immersion. Further, when I cannot understand what anyone is talking about at the dinner table and the questions I ask stunningly display my ignorance, my anonymity at a conference where no one knows who I am is a distinct advantage. Nonetheless, I know of no better way to learn the background of and the way people think about a field–reading papers just is not the same. Among the particularly memorable meetings of this sort were Protein Folding Dynamics, CAG Triplet Repeat Disorders, and Cell Death.

Like many other scientists, I have a primary, or home, GRC, and for me this remains Metals in Biology. I attend whenever I can to learn the latest, to discuss new ideas with people I trust and respect, to meet the newcomers to the field, and to catch up with friends. Yet there are other Gordon Conferences that have proved essential to my research because of what I learned and who I met. Those meetings include Metals in Medicine, Oxidative Stress and Disease, Oxygen Radicals, Protein Derived Cofactors, Radicals and Quinones, and Enzymes, Coenzymes and Metabolic Pathways.

Each year I look forward to reading the schedule of upcoming Gordon Conferences to find out who is speaking and what the hot new topics are. For me there is no better indicator of where science is today and what its future might be.