A Recurrent Theme

I just had dinner with a Drosophila geneticist, an historian of science specializing in taxonomy, a paleontologist whose expertise is trilobites, and a developmental biologist who is using sea anemone genome data to map mutants, the opposite of the way things were done when I was in graduate school. By now, we all pretty much know one another, and when I looked over at the other tables, I noted the eclectic mixes. Everyone here is talking about it, how this meeting is like no other. AAAS (Am