Attending a three day scientific meeting is quite an intense experience, my brain has been working hard and by this morning, there were leaks of stress all over the place!
So in some ways it was quite a relief to walk into the final session of the meeting this afternoon, but in other ways quite sad too. Dr Bryan Traynor from the National Institute for Health in the USA gave a concise, accessible and comprehensive overview of the ground breaking discovery of the C9orf72. It was good to hear the detective story of how he and his colleagues came to actually make the discovery, the analogy of gradually narrowing down the area of DNA to look in from a city the size of Sydney, to a long street to eventually to a small one-road-through-not-very-googable village was much appreciated. (It also manage to increase the species of analogy animals mentioned at the meeting to cows – not one that I’d heard mentioned until then).
For me however, the highlight of this session was Prof Kevin Talbot’s concluding presentation on ‘Where to from here’. It was an articulate summary of what the whole MND research community has been told, discussed and digested over the three day conference and suggested some pointers of where we should go next.
That’s me done until I get back to home!
My grateful thanks to Kelly and Kate back in the office for all their preparatory work for these posts, it was a team effort.
Read our official press release from day three of the symposium.
Hi Belinda and Kelly,
Any chance we can hear, see or read Professor Talbot’s presentation?
Hi Matt, I hope you’ve enjoyed our symposium reporting this year.
At the moment, i’m afraid we don’t have any further details on Prof Talbot’s presentation. Our conference team will be back in the UK next week, so we’ll see if they can give us any further information on his talk then. Sorry we can’t provide more information until then – we’ll keep you updated Matt.
Brilliant reporting from the symposium! Keep us posted with my question.