Researchers Cope With The Increasing Cost Of Convening

While working toward his doctorate in 1973, plant geneticist Peter Gresshoff received an invitation to attend one of the meetings sponsored every summer by the Gordon Research Conferences. For Gresshoff, the mere fact that he was tapped to join the select group of 100 scientists participating in the conference constituted an honor in itself. Substantially more exciting, though, was the prospect of spending a week in close quarters with some of the top researchers in his field. The invitation carried with it a waiver of the registration fee and a small travel stipend. Only one complication remained. Gresshoff, who was studying at the Australian National University in Canberra, had to find a way to pay for his trip to the conference site - in New Hampshire, half a world away. Gresshoff first turned to his department, which responded with some token support. Left to his own resources to finance the bulk of the trip, he sold his Land Rover and moonlighted as a bartender for six weeks. Still short of funds, he contacted universities in the United States that he guessed might share an interest in his research and volunteered to conduct seminars in exchange for whatever honoraria they could offer. His scheme paid off handsomely. "I got a lot of letters back," Gresshoff recalls, still a little bemused by the memory, "and then I looked at the map and thought, `Okay, [after the conference] I can go from Boston to East Lansing to St. Louis to Seattle and then down to California.' I ultimately managed to have only a very small personal expense for the trip." And for the duration of his stint at the Australian National University, until 1987, he regularly subsidized his attendance at meetings worldwide in the same fashion - by giving talks while on the road. Even today, as head of the plant molecular genetics department at the University of Tennessee with a sizable budget at his disposal, Gresshoff occasionally finds it necessary to resort to his old tactics. Last fall, for example, when in West Germany for a conference, he also lectured at a university there and in Switzerland, returning the fees he collected to his department to offset the cost of the trip. Gresshoff's approach represents a novel solution to a common, but nonetheless pressing, problem: What can scientists do about the high cost of attending professional conferences? It's an issue that affects scientists of all stripes, but it particularly bedevils young researchers. Lacking the stature to regularly attract all-expenses-paid invitations to give papers or lead seminars at meetings, they are the ones who must scramble the most to finance their travel. A random review of conferences in a cross-section of disciplines reveals that the average registration fee falls between $300 and $500. At the low end of the spectrum is the annual meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), to which AIAA members, government and military personnel, and students are admitted free. Near the other extreme is the trio of 1990 Communications Forums sponsored by the National Engineering Consortium, which carry individual price tags ranging from $975 to $995 for admission to each 2 1/2-day conference. But scientists say the registration fees are not the costs that pinch their purse strings. The real source of their discomfort is the expense of transportation, food, and lodging. Factor those expenses into the accounting and the tab for attending a conference can jump precipitously. "To go to the East Coast for a week is a $3,000 trip," says Frank Cannon, chief executive officer of Conductus, a California-based startup dedicated to producing affordable superconducting electronics. "You can blow $10,000 on one trip to Japan." In the ongoing fight to keep travel expenses under rein, scientists have a valuable ally in conference planners. Organizers make every effort to find ways to circumvent the high cost of travel for people attending their affairs. Conference staffers routinely negotiate with airlines, hotels, and even car-rental agencies for discounts. "With hotels, we generally get about 30 percent off their rack [standard] rate," reports Arthur Herschman, head of meetings and publications at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "The rack rate at the New Orleans Hilton [site of this year's AAAS annual meeting] was something like $158. We got it for about $100." From the airlines, he says, "we were able to get 40 percent off [the cost of a ticket] by dealing with United and Delta." The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) deliberately schedules its five annual conferences to fall around weekends, ASCB Meetings Manager Liz Culkin explains, to get better airline and hotel rates. Culkin also goes out of her way to investigate alternative sources of housing for budget-conscious attendees. "We look at YMCAs a lot. If there's a YMCA in a city and its rate is good, then we will publish that information," she says. Another way organizers seek to ease the fiscal burden of travel for scientists is by actively soliciting support from industry and government agencies. The contributions are then used to subsidize conference participants either indirectly, through lower registration fees, or in more direct fashion, through travel stipends awarded on the basis of individual need. Admittedly, a certain amount of self-interest is at work in motivating planners to hold prices down to their lowest possible level. The proliferation of conferences means increased competition for attendees. "We know we have to keep [costs] low in order to get the people there," Culkin says. But it also helps that those responsible for arranging conferences are frequently scientists themselves, and therefore attuned to the problems their colleagues face when it comes to travel. When scouting out sites for next year's Symposium on Polymer Analysis, governing board member Howard Barth considered holding the conference in Annapolis, Md., one of the state's premier tourist destinations. "I would love to have it there. The location is a big drawing card." However, Barth, who works as a researcher at Du Pont, also realized that the $140-a-night hotel rates "would kill those people from academia." As a result, he's now examining other areas. "We're in it for the science rather than finances. We try to open the meeting up as best we can to people that are interested," he says. --J.S. Compounding the problem of these hefty travel bills is the steady increase in the number of scientific symposia. In 1973, for instance, the Gordon Research Conferences conducted 76 meetings; that figure has now swelled to more than 130, and just this year the organization expanded its activities overseas, adding two conferences in Italy to its 1990 schedule. "When technology breeds technology, you can't help but have more conferences, especially when you have organizations whose sole purpose in life is to disseminate information," observes Frank Carrubba, director of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in California. For scientists eager to keep abreast of developments in their fields, the boom in conferences naturally boosts the opportunities to travel. "The time was when researchers would come in and say, `Look, I want to go to one national meeting and a Gordon Conference,' " Cannon says. "I know any number of people who would gladly have settled in the 1950s or 1960s for a commitment from their employer for those privileges. That's all they wanted." But now, he and other scientists say, there are enough symposia and meetings around to enable researchers to attend one every other week if they desired. At the same time, the importance of these forums in fostering the exchange of research and ideas has remained undiminished. And this makes the issue of how scientists cope with the costs of travel all the more relevant today. Research grants can supply scientists with a ready source of money to bankroll their attendance at meetings. Furthermore, so long as expenditures relate to the project being funded, recipients of government grants enjoy a small degree of freedom to allocate more money for travel than originally budgeted. Still, the pressing need to meet lab supply and personnel costs often relegates conference participation to a position of low priority. "I would rather use the money in the grant for equipment than blowing it on an airplane ticket that's twice as expensive as it really should be," because of the surcharge airlines customarily levy on weekday travel, says Lynn Wiley, an anatomist at the University of California, Davis. For those who are willing to allocate some of their funding to offset travel expenses, however, grants can ease some of the hardship by furnishing the recipients with a certain amount of self-sufficiency. Otherwise, when it comes to underwriting travel, scientists are largely dependent on the munificence of the institutions or companies that employ them. In this regard, policy can vary widely according to the financial resources of the organization or university department. The School of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, receives an average of about $40,000 in state and other funds to support travel for its 73 faculty members. This money is then dispensed according to an informal pecking order, reports William Sayle, the school's associate director, with requests from professors presenting invited papers or chairing a conference session taking precedence over all others. Alternatively, the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, Davis, parcels out its funds in a more uniform fashion. Each researcher "is pretty much guaranteed financial support for one meeting a year," Wiley says. "Some years, when there's a lot of money in the departmental budget, that can be as much as $1,000. This year it amounted to about $600." In the realm of industry, not surprisingly, a giant like Hewlett-Packard can afford to take a very liberal approach to the issue of travel support. The heads of the separate labs set their own policy, but in general "if people are presenting a paper, then they have carte blanche to go," says labs director Carrubba. However, the situation is not quite so cushy at Matritech, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup engaged in developing commercial kits for cancer diagnoses. Vice President Graham Lidgard gives researchers in his R&D group a ticket to attend one meeting of their choice a year. "Anything other than that has to be specifically justified and have a major benefit for the company," he says. When money is not forthcoming from their employers, scientists still have several avenues to pursue before turning to the lecture circuit in the style of Peter Gresshoff. Research associations affiliated with universities commonly tender travel support to faculty on a limited basis. Typical among these is the University of Connecticut Research Foundation, which extends awards of up to $1,000 a year to faculty members actively participating in meetings. Other sources of possible succor are the individuals or groups that organize a given conference. For instance, the National Engineering Consortium administers a grant program for academics who wish to attend any of its Communications Forums. The grant covers not only the $975-$995 registration fee, but also the cost of accommodations. The Gordon Research Conferences are also noteworthy for the support they offer attendees. The person chairing each conference receives $11,600 to dispense to participants in need of financial assistance. Any additional funds the meeting chair drums up from government and industry are also used for the same purpose. Even if a meeting program or application form makes no mention of available aid, it often pays to approach the head of the conference with an entreaty for help. Chemist Howard Barth of the Wilmington, Del.-based Du Pont Co., one of the organizers of the Third International Symposium on Polymer Analysis and Characterization, acknowledges that while the conference does not advertise the fact, the governing board will cut a deal with a scientist if the circumstances warrant it. "If someone really wants to go to a meeting, but just can't get funding or has exhausted their funds, we'll give them a break with registration. We'll bend over backwards for people if finances are a problem," he says. When coffers are empty and alternative sources of funding exhausted, scientists have little choice but to absorb the expense of travel themselves or forgo attendance at the conference. It's a dilemma that is all too familiar to Norman Gray, head of the geology and geophysics department at the University of Connecticut. Although a special donation set up by the Leonhardt Foundation - a private funding source - supports student travel, Gray explains, the departmental budget provides absolutely no money for faculty trips. As a result, "there are a lot of meetings we should attend but don't, because of the costs." Sometimes, though, with an ingenuity born of desperation, Gray and his colleagues engage in a little sleight-of-hand to finance an excursion to a conference. "What happens is that a group of the faculty will rent a van to go to a conference and drive students along, and pay for the costs of the van out of the Leonhardt Foundation," he says. The ever-expanding roster of conferences confronting scientists has, by necessity, hardened attitudes toward such gatherings: Researchers and administrators say they now look closer than ever at each gathering's relative merits before consigning their travel dollars. The key factors they consider when evaluating a meeting are its track record, the credentials of invited speakers and other participants, and the importance of the subject to the prospective attendee's work. The cost of the conference definitely colors this judgment, too. Some scientists even boycott those conferences that seem flagrantly expensive. Lynn Wiley purposefully shuns meetings hosted by any clinical society. "They often hold their conferences in fancy hotels that are at least $100 a night and that are in semivacation areas," she says. "The clinicians pay for that out of their high salaries, but you don't see any poor, starving graduate students at these meetings." Peter Gresshoff also steers clear of meetings he finds too ritzy for his taste. A good conference, he says, is accessible to the entire scientific community - graduate students, young academics, even people from Third World countries - "not just the big shots who have the expense accounts," he says. Besides being more selective in choosing which meetings to attend, scientists have battled back against conference costs by relying on the common-sense measures that any savvy travel agent would advise. Conference-goers purchase plane tickets in advance, fly over weekends to take advantage of special discount rates, and search around for the best hotel deals to get more mileage out of their money. "Live cheap" is geologist Gray's credo. "We look for alumni in the area whom we can stay with, or pack three or four people into a single hotel room," he says. In general, though, there is nothing very new or profound about the steps scientists take to curb costs, asserts Conductus CEO Frank Cannon. "This is just sound business practice." Jeff Seiken is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh.

Researchers Cope With The Increasing Cost Of Convening

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