When we did a survey among attendees of the British Society for Development Biology meeting in April, we asked what topics you would like to discuss on the Node. One of the top answers was careers, so we’ll be sure to include posts about opportunities in developmental biology, and we hope you’ll join us to share some of your stories and tips, or let us know if your lab is hiring.

To start you off, here is an uplifting story about an unconventional entry into a developmental biology career.

Earlier this month, the Carnegie Institution for Science in Baltimore awarded one of their staff members, Dianne Williams, with the Carnegie Service to Science Award. Dianne joined the institute in 1983, not as a research student, but as a lab dishwasher as part of a work program for inner city youth. She then started preparing fly food for Allan Spradling’s lab, and learned about Drosophila maintenance and molecular biology. While working during the day, she attended Johns Hopkins University at night and eventually earned her MSc degree, publishing her graduate work in a first-author paper in PNAS. After that, she continued to work as a technician in the Spradling lab, and produced an antibody against the germline protein Vasa that is currently used by researchers around the world.

It’s certainly not the most straightforward route to a career in the lab, and Dianne must have put a lot of effort and energy into studying biology at night after already working in a lab all day. But it does show that there is more than one way to the bench.

How did you end up in biology? And what do you hope to do next?

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Earlier this month, Shinya Yamanaka, of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, won the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology for his groundbreaking work on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). Yamanaka was the first to generate iPS cells from somatic cells – first from mouse fibroblasts and later from human fibroblasts – showing that it was possible to create pluripotent cells without relying solely on embryonic stem cells. He received his award on May 3 at the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel in Vancouver.

The March of Dimes Prize, worth $250,000, has been awarded since 1996 to developmental biologists whose work contributes to the prevention and treatment of birth defects and other diseases. Five of the past recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.

Here is a video about the award, showing past winners (until 2007)

(image from Wikimedia commons)

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At the Node we welcome reports from scientific meetings, but only if the meeting organizers and speakers allow it. I’m currently writing the Node’s guidelines for meeting reports, and then realized I could fill an entire post with additional information and links. Unlike the guidelines, anything in this post is very general advice and not Node-specific.

First, find out if the meeting organizers have outlined a specific media or reporting policy. It varies a lot between meetings, and what is fine for one type of conference is absolutely not okay for another. For example, you are not allowed to report on any of the presentations at a Gordon Research Conference. They’re very explicit about this policy, and you should respect that. At the the other end of the spectrum is the Society for Neuroscience, who encouraged bloggers to write about their 2009 conference, and even selected a group of official “Neurobloggers”.
Most meetings will have a reporting policy in between these two extremes, and if they put their policy on their website, it usually tells you to ask for permission. CSHL updated their reporting policy in 2009 to include bloggers, and requires you to ask permission from the presenters before you write about them or their research. They also ask you to let them know whenever you intend to blog from or about one of their meetings. Keystone Symposia’s policy is very similar, and also asks you to ask permission from the speaker before blogging about their presentations.

What if there are no guidelines published? To avoid catching speakers and organizers by surprise, e-mail the meeting organizers to let them know you want to write about the meeting, and suggest that you will ask permission from each speaker individually before mentioning any scientific content. If the meeting organizer says that you’re not allowed to blog anything from the meeting, don’t do it. If they give you permission, save that correspondence in case you get into an unexpected conflict later. (This is why e-mail is better than asking in person!) The speakers’ e-mail addresses will usually be in the program booklet. Once you have decided that you liked a talk so much that you want to write about it, drop them a line. They might want to see your blog post before you upload it, or want to know where to find it.

If you haven’t asked for permission, or haven’t received it, you can still write a little bit about the meeting, but only as much as is already publicly available. This means that if a meeting organizer only publishes the name of the conference and the location, you can’t even mention the names of people who were there without their consent. If the entire program and all the poster abstracts are publicly available, you can include the names of speakers and the general topic of their talk or poster.

So why are conference organizers so strict about blogging? Aren’t the talks public knowledge now that the audience heard them? No!
The purpose of scientific conferences is not to tell the whole world about new research, but to update a group of other scientists about current projects. This means that a lot of unpublished data are shown; data that still need to be published in a journal. Most journals will not publish data that have previously been published elsewhere, and that includes results mentioned on a blog. To put it very bluntly: A blog post that contains unpublished data has the potential to ruin someone’s career.

A lot of journals do publish official meeting reports, but these are sent to the speakers before it’s published. When speakers see a draft of the meeting report that includes a little too much detail about their work, they ask the author to remove it. If you write about a talk on your blog, speakers have no such control over it. Organizers and speakers may still contact you after you publish the blog post, and ask for it to be removed. Please do so if they ask.

To summarize: if you want to blog about a meeting, make sure you have permission from the organizers and speakers, or only mention as much as is already publicly available.

(Photo by Eva Amsen. Taken at Science Online London 2009 – a conference that explicitly encouraged participants to blog about the talks.)

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Earlier this year, Cold Spring Harbor Asia opened a new conference centre in Suzhou, China. Located near Shanghai, the conference centre gives the research community in Asia an international conference centre close to home.

The Cold Spring Harbor Asia conference centre lobby reflects Chinese design. (Image used with permission)

After the opening ceremony on April 6, the new conference centre was host to two back-to-back meetings: the “James Watson Symposium on Cancer” and the ‘Francis Crick Symposium on Neuroscience”.

The September schedule looks especially appealing for developmental biologists, with “Human Genetics and Genomics” from September 6 to 10, and “Molecular Switches and Genome Function in Stem Cells & Development” from September 21 to 25.

I’m curious to see how the presence of the conference centre will affect research in Asia in the long term. If you’re attending one of the conferences at the new location, why not drop by the Node to tell us what you think!

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(Interview by Kathryn Senior. Originally published in Development)

Stephen Wilson is Professor of Developmental Genetics at University College, London, UK. He was recently awarded the Remedios Caro Almela Prize for Research in Developmental Neurobiology. We interviewed Steve to find out about how he started on the road to developmental biology research, how he got interested in the brain, his achievements and future challenges.

What originally set you on the road towards a career in science?

I dropped biology at school and was all set to study metallurgy at University for no good reason at all. Luckily I realized this just before starting. The fact that the course was entirely populated by male students helped my decision-making… I took a year off, worked in a school lab and realized that I loved biology – that was the start.

You have chosen to focus on the most complex organ – the brain – what prompted that choice?

I went to Steve Easter’s lab as a post-doc to work on the developing eye and retino-tectal projection. You might say it was serendipity but the first time I tried to label retinal axons, I stuck the needle through the back of the eye and into the brain. I labelled lots of neurons that were not supposed to be there. My time as a post-doc was spent trying to find out more about these very early forebrain neurons – I’m still on the same mission.

What is the most frustrating challenge that you have had in your research and how did you tackle it?

Perhaps ‘frustrating’ is not the right adjective but a challenge that taught me a lot arose during my time as a post-doc. My closest friend at the time (with whom I shared an apartment) was working on essentially the same project as me but in a competing, neighbouring lab. This was quite a challenge for us to cope with. We both learned that friendship is far more important than the transient troubles one faces in the lab – most of which resolve and fade from memory in a few months.

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From April 12 to 15, the British Societies for Cell Biology and Developmental Biology are holding a joint meeting in Warwick. The program is full of interesting talks: Always two at the same time, making it hard to choose what to listen to.

Personally, I’m excited about this event because it is the first time I get to show people the Node! We’re projecting the Node on screen at our booth, and I’ll be walking around in between the talks to show people how to use the site. I hope we get lots of feedback and enthusiastic contributors!

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In February 2010, The Company of Biologists (which publishes Development and hosts the Node) organized the first of a series of workshops. The theme of the workshop was “Neural Stem Cells in Development and Disease”, and was attended by a variety of researchers: some work on the role of neural stem cells in development, while others studied disease models. The workshop was unique in bringing together scientists from these different areas.
In a few weeks, we’ll post an interview with the organizers of this workshop, so you’ll hear more about it. For now, here’s a group shot of all the participants

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(Interview by James Briscoe. Originally published in Development)

Olivier Pourquié is the new director of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC) in Strasbourg, France, and as of this month takes on another crucially important role in the developmental community — that of Development‘s new Editor in Chief. Recently, we asked James Briscoe, in his capacity as a director of the Company of Biologists, to interview Olivier and to discover more about his research career and interests and how they will shape the future content and directions of Development.

Describe your research interests in one sentence?
I am interested in embryonic patterning in vertebrates.

What projects are you working on at the moment?
We are trying to figure out how axis extension and segmentation are controlled in vertebrates. We are also carrying out large-scale studies to figure out the logic of the transcriptional programme that underlies paraxial mesoderm development.

What has been the most exciting moment in your career?
Realising that the static pictures of gene expression that we were seeing in the embryo in fact reflected the oscillatory gene expression that is associated with somite formation.

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A few weeks ago, Thomson Reuters selected the world’s hottest researchers. Their measurement of “hotness” is how often an author’s recent papers were cited by other researchers during 2009. At the top of the list is Rudolf Jaenisch of MIT, who authored 14 of those “hot papers”. The top institute on the list is the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which has four researchers in the field of genetics and genomics represented in the top 12. Most “hot” scientists are based in the US, according to this list, but researchers from the UK, The Netherlands, China, and Japan also made the cut.

See the full list on Thompson Reuters’ website. What do you think of the ranking of researchers by citation scores as a measure of “hotness”?

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Welcome to the Node! This is a place for developmental biologists to share the latest news, discuss topics related to their field, and see what’s new.

This site is managed by the journal Development, but the content is written by a variety of contributors. That could include you! If you have anything to share with the developmental biology community and want to participate in the discussions, sign up for an account.

You can subscribe to posts by e-mail or RSS, but remember to visit the site to comment on posts. You can also follow the Node on Twitter, or read more about us on the “About” page.

Have a look around, participate, and let us know what you think – either in the comments or by e-mail.

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