Meetings Bloody Meetings

Generation zap

THEY are certainly not Bilderberg. Nor, quite, are they Davos. But the Lindau Nobel laureate meetings, held every summer on the shores of Lake Constance, are probably, in the long run, as influential as either of these more famous meetings of the great and good. They are intergenerational get-togethers par excellence, with two groups of people mingling freely. One is a selection of Nobel prizewinners. The other is several hundred of the brightest and best young scientists on the planet. For five days, the prizewinners give lectures, preside over no-holds-barred seminars and conduct mealtime tutorials, while the youngsters look, listen and bowl their elders intellectual googlies—and, of course, talk to each other incessantly. So, though they may not shape today’s world in the way those other two conclaves do, the meetings at Lindau certainly help shape tomorrow’s. 

There being three Nobel science prizes, for chemistry, physics, and physiology or medicine, the focus of the meetings rotates from year to year. This year is medicine’s turn, and the theme is global health. Not all the lectures have stuck strictly to topic (getting Nobel prizewinners to do what you want them to is rather like herding cats). But the guru of global-health philanthropy, Bill Gates, came along for the opening ceremony on Sunday, and helped impose some sort of order on the proceedings by joining in a panel discussion with young researchers involved in malaria control and HIV-vaccine development.

The real business, though, began on Monday morning, with lectures ranging in topic from the synapses that allow nerve cells to communicate via the telomeres that stop chromosomes unravelling to the ribosomes that assemble proteins out of amino acids according to instructions transcribed from the genes in a cell’s nucleus.

This last was given by Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute in Israel (prize for physiology or medicine in 2009). Her struggle to get the ribosomes to crystallise, so that she could examine their structure with X-rays (she knew it could be done, because they do so in hibernating polar bears), was an example of the bloody-mindedness that is often necessary to do good science. The consequences are extraordinary. As a result of her work, the location of every atom in a ribosome is now known—as is the tiny molecular difference between the ribosomes of mammals and those of bacteria. Yet that difference is what allows many common antibiotics to do their job. Because of it, they can gum up the works of a bacterial ribosome while leaving mammalian ones untouched. Indeed, 40% of antibiotics work by gumming up bacterial ribosomes in one way or another. Understanding ribosomes, then, is crucial to designing the next generation of antibiotics, which many doctors believe will be needed as the existing ones fall prey to the evolution of resistance.

John Quiggin » Meetings, bloody meetings

There have been quite a few important meetings lately including COAG, G8 and the Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change (MEM) in Japan, attended by Kevin Rudd. Anyone expecting substantial progress to come out of these particular meetings was surely disappointed. But to look on the bright side, if any of these meetings had been held even a year ago, the results would have represented a substantial breakthrough.

Starting with COAG, the obvious disappointment was the lack of any immediate response to the drastic problems facing the Murray-Darling system. While most of the policies are now pointing in the right direction, nothing will really happen until 2009. The decision not to increase the amount of water that could be traded out of a region from 4 per cent to 6 per cent (still a tight restriction) was symbolic of the process as a whole. That said, there is currently so little water in the system that no amount of reform is going to do much good in the short run. We have to hope for the best.

The Major Emitters Meeting produced fairly predictable statements by China and India that the developed countries had to do more. With the US still to make any firm commitment, we’re unlikely to see much advance on that before the Copenhagen meeting, with a new Administration, next year. Still, that was accompanied by an acceptance in principle of targets for reduced emissions. And at least in one respect, these countries are walking the walk. Fuel subsidies in Asia are being cut in response to increased costs associated with higher oil prices. That’s a pretty sharp contrast with proposals for new concessions coming from (among others), Clinton and McCain in the US and Nelson and Turnbull here.

Finally, although the G8 proposal for a 50 per cent in global emissions by 2050 was carefully hedged, it’s still good news. Although this wasn’t spelt out a 50 per cent in global emissions requires a much bigger cut in developed country emissions, so even a weak commitment now will make backsliding harder in Copenhagen.

Why is it that most of the world was totally unprepaired for the oil price rise even after nearly 50 years of warnings? We still have learned bodies like ABARE forecasting oil prices dropping back to $50/barrel, and they have been doing this for the last 2 years. Consequently many government departments are planning highway construction and suburbs witout public transport on the assumption that growth can continue. Even the CSIRO in its Future Delimmas report didn’t mention the impact of oil prices, it was if this was only a temporary problem.

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