Outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center's Great Hall, ASCB 2013Building support for basic research, the allocation of federal funding, fixing peer review, and improving research assessment were hot topics at the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) annual meeting held in New Orleans this week. Here are some notable quotes from the conference.
—Biologist Craig Venter, discussing his team’s synthetic genomics work.
—Yale University’s James Rothman on the questions he asked himself when he received his early-morning phone call informing him that he’d just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on vesicular transport.
—ASCB President Don Cleveland, from the University of California, San Diego, discussing the increasing pressure on cell biologists to pursue projects of potential clinical significance.
—University of California, Berkeley’s David Drubin on one reason for launching the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment—which aims “to improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated”—last year.
While joining the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) as director at a time the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget ...
