Annual NIH `Show And Tell' Celebrates Intramural Research Advances

Symposia: Monday, September 19, 8:45 a.m.-noon: NICHD Distinguished Alumni Symposium: Contributions of Basic Science to Human Biomedical Research (Bldg. 10, Masur Auditorium) Tuesday, September 20, 8:30 a.m.-noon: HIV Pathogenesis and Therapy (Bldg. 10, Masur Auditorium) Tuesday, 8:30 a.m.-noon: Apoptosis and the Cell Cycle (Bldg. 10, Lipsett Amphitheater) Wednesday, September 21, 8:30 a.m.-noon: Genetic Predisposition to Diseases (Bldg. 10, Masur Auditorium) Wednesday, 8:30 a.m.-noon: Imaging (Bldg. 10, Lipsett Amphitheater) Wednesday, 8:30 a.m.-noon: DNA Repair (Bldg. 38A, Lister Hill Auditorium) Poster Session: Monday, 1:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m.: (Research Festival tents in Parking Lot 10-D) Workshops: Wednesday, 8:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m.: Computing for Molecular Biology (Bldg. 12A, Rooms B-45, B-51, 2047) Tuesday, 2:30 p.m.-5:00 p.m., and Wednesday, 8:30 a.m.- 11:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.-5:00 a.m.: 52 sessions to be held Technical Sales Association Scientific Equipment Show: Thursday, September 22 and Friday, September 23, 9:30 a.m.- 4:00 p.m.: (Research Festival tents in Parking Lot 10-D) For five days beginning September 19, researchers from the 25 institutes, centers, and divisions of the National Institutes of Health will be getting together to talk about their work and learn what their colleagues are doing. They will be convening at an event called "NIH Research Festival '94." The gathering, held annually for the past seven years at the agency's Bethesda, Md., campus, will feature three days of symposia, poster sessions, and workshops by intramural scientists, followed by a two-day exposition of scientific equipment and services. Organizers say that the program--with an expected attendance of 8,000--is intended primarily as an occasion for NIH scientists to interact with each other and compare notes. But the festival does attract other people, as well, particularly from the surrounding biomedical community. "This is an all-purpose show-and-tell event for NIH--a celebration of what we are," says Gordon Guroff, deputy scientific director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). "Postdocs get an opportunity to meet some of the senior people. We also encourage reporters and congressional people to come to the meeting." Kicking off the festival will be the Distinguished Alumni Symposium--an annual seminar run by a different institute each year and dedicated to a distinguished alumnus of that institute. This year, NICHD is holding the seminar--focusing on developmental biology--in honor of Philip Leder, now a professor of genetics at Harvard University Medical School in Boston and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator there. Among Leder's accomplishments at NICHD was establishing and developing its Laboratory of Molecular Genetics. Following talks on their current research by five other noteworthy NICHD alumni, Leder will deliver a lecture on his recent work entitled "Limb Deformity: A Morphogenic Paradigm in the Mouse." He will also receive an award from NICHD director Arthur Levine. Three of the five other featured speakers--Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine in Japan; Stuart Orkin of Children's Hospital, Boston; and Shirley Tilghman of Princeton University in New Jersey--are "products of Leder's lab," says Guroff. William W. Chin, a researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and Gerald D. Fischbach of Harvard's medical school also will be speaking. The broad scope of research conducted at the various NIH agencies will be apparent in the variety of posters and workshops to be presented in the three days. Some 300 posters, grouped by subject into 14 different categories, will be displayed in special tents set up in parking lots adjacent to the NIH clinical center (Building 10). Besides such general subjects as immunology, neurobiology, and epidemiology, posters under such specialized categories as apoptosis, signal transduction, and transgenic animal models will offer insights into today's particularly active fields of biomedical research. Fifty-two workshop sessions are to include such widely disparate topics as "Intracellular Trafficking," "Genetics and Substance Abuse," and "Molecular Epidemiology of Cancer Risk." In addition, NIH's Division of Computer Research and Technology (DCRT) has put together a special, day-long workshop on the applications of computers in molecular biology. "There is a vast amount of computation being expended to support different research projects at NIH," says Adrian Parsegian, who is the chief of the laboratory of structural biology at DCRT. "The [Human] Genome Project requires computer support for collecting DNA sequence information, as well as comparisons and analysis. The study of three- dimensional protein structures is also computer-intensive-- we have software to convert long lists of numbers into meaningful structures. "The workshop is a way to keep researchers abreast of what can be done with computers and how to do it," he adds. The two-day trade show following the symposia and workshops is being sponsored by the Technical Sales Association (TSA), a nonprofit trade organization based in Falls Church, Va., that puts together such exhibitions for the biomedical research community. About 400 TSA members, including large companies such as Fullerton, Calif.-based Beckman Instruments Inc. and smaller, local firms such as Biotech Research Laboratories, Rockville, Md., will be on hand to display and promote their products and services. According to TSA members, exhibiting at targeted, on-site programs such as the NIH Research Festival holds some distinct advantages over appearing at larger trade shows. "The cost to attend [for an exhibitor] is very reasonable--a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand at the larger meetings--and the attendance [of researchers] is very, very good," says Victor Erickson, a representative of Biotech Research Laboratories, a company providing laboratory and technical support services in molecular and cell biology to laboratories in the Washington and Maryland areas. "The percentage of quality research leads that are converted to sales at this show have been [very] high," says Jerry Kravetzker, a Columbia, Md.-based manager for Beckman Instruments. Kravetzker also points to the timing of this meeting, held for the past few years during the third week of September, as being particularly opportune for exhibitors, noting that "the scientists who come get ideas for new equipment for the next fiscal year." Among the devices that Beckman will display this year are: BIOMEK-2000, a robotic workstation that automates pipetting at the microliter scale; and P/ACE- 5500, a capillary electrophoresis machine that can separate extremely minute quantities (on a picogram scale) of material. For more information about the Research Festival, contact Gregory Roa at the NIH Visitors' Center, (301) 496-1776. Questions about the TSA trade show can be addressed to Suzanne Snyder, TSA exhibit manager, Global Trade Production Inc., 5203 Leesburg Pike, Suite 1313, Falls Church, Va. 22041; (703) 671-1400.

Annual NIH `Show And Tell' Celebrates Intramural Research Advances

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