A somber society meeting

Ostensibly a congress of corporate and academic researchers to laud the wonders of fluorescence, automation, and miniaturization, the September 2001 meeting of the Society for Biomolecular Screening in Baltimore came to a tearful halt with the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon.

The show started at a leisurely pace on Sunday with a series of short courses and corporate workshops highlighting the uses of technologies such as fluorescence-based assays and green fluorescent protein-based diagnostics in drug development and screening. Monday morning saw George M. Whitesides, Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, deliver the keynote address in which he gave his opinions on the roles that technologies such as soft lithography, self-assembled monolayers, and controlled laminar flow will have on drug screening. This talk was followed by sessions dedicated to target identification and biochips.

Tuesday started with a sessiondedicated to compound library management, but perhaps the most interesting session was the one devoted to technology comparisons, a subject that is sorely missing from other conferences. Posters presented on the show floor that compared technologies such as radiometry and fluorescence, and TR-FRET and ELISA, paralleled the earlier presentations. But the focus on the show floor quickly shifted from biomolecular screening to terrorism. People by the dozens flipped open cell phones, holding fingers to open ears in an attempt to better hear dial tones that were not there, moving swiftly from the floor into the atrium hunting in vain for a signal from above.

A voice boomed from the public address system letting us know that the impossible had indeed happened and that planes had struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. All speech ceased as a thoughtful pall descended on the floor, with only the perpetual whine and click of the robotic plate handlers breaking the silence. Finally, the voice broke through to tell us that it would try to keep us up-to-date as information came in.

But the waiting became too much as the line for computer access became longer and the cell phones were intermittent comfort at best. A crowd formed around the booth hosted by Beckman Coulter, which had turned its large screen monitors to CNN, and we all stood transfixed as we witnessed the madness that was New York. Some of the witnesses wiped away tears while others whispered silent prayers.

By noon, the day was over and convention center staff moved through the hall trying to herd attendees into the atrium while company representatives threw swatches of cloth over the equipment and turned off the lights. Without a defined place to go, however, the attendees milled about the atrium for several minutes before finally flowing as if by gravity into the streets around the convention center.

The conference that started with such high scientific hopes was interrupted by an act of insane brutality.