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Still Blazing Trails At 75

Gordon Research Conferences celebrate a rich history of nurturing the frontiers of science

by Amanda Yarnell
July 17, 2006 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 84, Issue 29

PROVING GROUND
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Credit: Records Of GRC, Courtesy Of CHF Collections
Gordon conference lectures, like this one at Colby Junior College in New Hampshire, are legendary for spirited and often critical discussion.
Credit: Records Of GRC, Courtesy Of CHF Collections
Gordon conference lectures, like this one at Colby Junior College in New Hampshire, are legendary for spirited and often critical discussion.

It might be the test of a true scientist: Is your idea of the perfect summer trip a week relaxing on a sun-kissed beach or a week holed up in an otherwise deserted prep school campus in New England, debating your latest results with 100 of your colleagues and competitors?

Despite their reputation for cafeteria food and dorm-style accommodations, the Gordon Research Conferences (GRC) remain the highlight of many a scientist's summer. Now in their 75th year, these much-loved conferences continue to shape both the lives of scientists and the frontiers of scientific research.

The conferences have a long and storied history at the leading edge of science. Enrico Fermi described the slow-neutron process of atomic disintegration to a Gordon conference audience in 1936, a decade before the atomic bomb was unleashed on the world. The implications of recombinant DNA technology first came to the fore at the 1973 Gordon conference on nucleic acids. More recently, the meetings have played a key role in the birth of interdisciplinary fields such as bioinorganic chemistry and organic electronics.

The secret to the conferences' success, says GRC Director Nancy Ryan Gray, is simple: Encourage a small group of scientists to engage in critical and unrestrained debate of the latest research results, not only during structured scientific sessions, but also in the cafeteria, on the hiking trails, and by the pool. This year that simple formula has drawn more than 20,000 scientists to sessions, Gray points out. In total, GRC now runs 365 annual, biennial, and triennial conferences focused on cutting-edge topics in biology, physics, chemistry, and even science education and policy.

LAID-BACK
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Credit: Records Of GRC, Courtesy Of CHF Collections
From their earliest days, Gordon conferences have provided ample leisure time.
Credit: Records Of GRC, Courtesy Of CHF Collections
From their earliest days, Gordon conferences have provided ample leisure time.

The Gordon conferences grew out of a series of summer chemistry meetings held at Johns Hopkins University. When chemist and chemical educator Neil Elbridge Gordon joined the department, "he was unhappy with the size of most scientific conferences and the style of presentations," says Arthur Daemmrich, a historian with the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF). Gordon seized the opportunity to create a new, more intimate conference atmosphere that would stimulate unfettered scientific discussion. By 1934, he had persuaded the university to move the increasingly successful series to Gibson Island, an exclusive and secluded speck of land in the Chesapeake Bay.

As Gordon had hoped, the conferences' mix of laid-back atmosphere and spirited scientific discussion coaxed scientists to keep coming back. To accommodate growing attendance at those early meetings, which were held at the Gibson Island Club, Gordon used his considerable fund-raising prowess to finance the purchase of a larger house nearby. But club residents objected both to the crowds the meetings brought to their exclusive club and to the scientists' routine failure to wear jackets when required. One-time GRC director W. George Parks recalled the tension in a 1956 article in the Saturday Review: "One conferee overheard an exchange between two Baltimore aristocrats ensconced on the club verandah in rocking chairs. 'Who are those people who have invaded our island?' the one lady inquired. 'Oh,' the other replied with a sniff, 'they're Dr. Gordon's serious thinkers.'" As a result, the meetings were moved to friendlier, but far less posh, digs at Colby Junior College (now Colby-Sawyer College) in New Hampshire.

The conferences flourished in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, providing ample opportunities for attendees to form long-lasting friendships while in the local swimming hole, on the golf course, or getting lost in the woods. Brandeis University structural biologist Dagmar Ringe traces the beginnings of her fruitful collaboration and friendship with enzymologist Jack Kirsch of the University of California, Berkeley, back to a dip in a cold stream one sweltering afternoon during an Enzymes, Coenzymes & Metabolic Pathways Gordon conference in the mid-1980s. Their work altered the course of her lab's work, Ringe says. "I always used to think that the combination of cold water and hot air is what led to great thoughts."

Today, Gordon conferences are held at 23 different sites in New England, California, Europe, and Asia. But whatever the venue, the signature format remains the same: Each conference is five days long, with scientific sessions each morning and evening and free time each afternoon.

This format allows ample time for frank−always spirited and often critical−scientific discourse. It's with fondness that inorganic chemist Robert W. Parry of the University of Utah recalls being taken to task as a young faculty member at his first Gordon conference in 1945. "I wasn't prepared with data to support my claims, and they were brutal," he says. "But it taught me an important lesson," and a few years later when he was invited to talk again he came armed with the necessary data. "The collegial skepticism Gordon conferences promote is very important to science," he says.

The conferences' strict off-the-record policy further nurtures free and open discussion, explains Deborah Charych of the Novartis Institutes for Biological Research. Charych notes that the policy−which prohibits photography, recording, or publication of conference proceedings−allowed scientists to engage in open and frank discussion about current and future needs for sensors capable of detecting chemical and biological warfare agents in conferences on Chemical Sensors & Interfacial Design, even before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The conferences "allow scientists the luxury of speculative, off-the-cuff discussion," adds retired medicinal chemist Paul Anderson. Like Ringe and Charych, Anderson serves on the GRC board of trustees.

Perhaps equally valuable, notes P. Roy Vagelos, former chief executive officer at Merck, is that the conferences operate "without hierarchy." In "Reflections from the Frontiers," a book of essays compiled by GRC and CHF in celebration of the meetings' 75th anniversary, Vagelos recalls his first conference in 1963, where he−then a "pip-squeak only a few years out of a postdoctoral fellowship"−shared the podium with some of the giants in the field of lipid metabolism. "It was amazing to sit with people who were significantly older and much more accomplished and be in a position to swap information with them."

Over the years, the unique environment that Gordon conferences provide has nurtured not only new scientific knowledge and friendships but also a number of new techniques and commercial products, Daemmrich notes. These include a method for quantifying the correlation between biological activity and chemical structure that's found wide use in medicinal and computational chemistry and the development of a treatment for African sleeping sickness.

Gordon conferences also have proved fertile ground for the emergence of whole new disciplines, Daemmrich points out. "The conference on Metals in Biology built a bridge across the divide between inorganic chemistry and biology," giving rise to the now-booming field of bioinorganic chemistry, recalls Harry B. Gray of California Institute of Technology. Those early conferences in the 1960s and early 1970s were "full of tension and arguments between inorganic chemists and biologists," he says, but the meetings' intimate, interactive atmosphere "forced us to start talking and working together."

Gordon conferences also played a key role in the emergence of the field of organic electronics, according to Charles B. Duke of Xerox. The 1977 Chemistry & Physics of Solids conference brought together previously compartmentalized researchers from both industry and academia who were interested in organic electronics. Thanks to their interdisciplinary and open nature, this and subsequent meetings acted as a "midwife" to the birth of organic electronics, he explains in "Reflections from the Frontiers."

GRC is dedicated to continuing its role as midwife. "The organization is relentlessly driven to stay at the leading edge of science," Daemmrich says. Indeed, the not-for-profit GRC continues to be ruthless about reevaluating the merit of current conferences and considering new ones. And as it looks forward to the future, GRC is thinking carefully about how it can grow its presence outside the U.S. "We are committed to serving science," says GRC's Gray, "and that's where science is growing." Her 18-member staff is currently exploring interest in and feasibility of holding Gordon conferences in sites in China and India.

Imitation being the purest form of flattery, the highly regarded format has been copied by many others hoping to replicate its success. But Gray says she's not worried about the increased competition, "at least as long as we continue to do what we've done for the last 75 years−bring people together at the frontiers of science."

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Still Blazing Trails At 75

Gordon Research Conferences celebrate a rich history of nurturing the frontiers of science

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