2001
NATIONAL DROSOPHILA BOARD MEETING
|
INTRODUCTIONS, APPROVAL
OF THE 2000 MINUTES |
2:00
- 2:10 |
|
MEETING FORMAT AND
ORGANIZATION: |
2:10
- 2:50 |
|
2001 PROGRAM COMMITTEE (Mariana W., Mike G.) |
2:10 - 2:30 |
|
SANDLER
LECTURER COMMITTEE (Lynn Cooley) |
2:30 -
2:35 |
|
2002
PROGRAM COMMITTEE ( Ken B., Chuck L. ) |
2:35 -
2:40 |
|
Meeting Format & Workshop
Discussion |
2:40 - 2:50 |
|
MEETING SITE
SELECTION: |
2:50
- 3:15 |
|
GSA
COORDINATOR (Marsha Ryan) |
2:50 - 3:05 |
|
DISCUSSION ON 2004 MEETING SITE |
3:05 -
3:15 |
|
FLY BOARD
FINANCES: |
3:15
- 3:50 |
|
TREASURER
(Steve Mount) |
3:15 -
3:25 |
|
BOARD
DISCUSSION OF FINANCES, SPONSORS |
3:25 -
3:50 |
|
FLY BOARD
COMPOSITION |
4:00
- 4:15 |
|
ELECTION COMM
(Gary K.) AND
DISCUSSION |
4:00 -
4:15 |
|
COMMUNITY
RESOURCES: |
4:15
- 5:00 |
|
STOCK
CENTER ADVISORY COM. (Hugo
Bellen) |
4:15 -
4:20 |
|
BLOOMINGTON
STOCK CENTER (Kevin Cook) |
4:20 -
4:30 |
|
STOCK CENTERS: PAST, ONGOING, AND NEW |
4:30 -
4:50 |
|
DIS
(Jim Thompson) |
4:50 -
4:55 |
|
FLYBASE
(Bill Gelbart) |
4:55 -
5:00 |
|
PATENT
ISSUES IN KNOCKOUT PROJECT (ALLAN S.) |
5:00
- 5:30 |
|
SUPPORT
OF INT. CONG. GENETICS '03 (BATTERHAM) |
5:30
- 5:45 |
OTHER BUSINESS
|
5:45
- 6:00 |
DRAFT REPORTS
1. REPORT OF THE 2001 PROGRAM COMMITTEE (Mariana
Wolfner, Mike Goldberg)
Registration - Preregistration for the meeting has been stronger than
anticipated. To date (as of
3/12/01), 1430 people (a record high!) have registered for the meeting; the
breakdown is provided below. An
additional 100 participants are expected to register at the meeting
itself. This represents a strong
increase in attendance relative to the prior year (994 preregistered plus 189
on-site registrants, for a total of 1183). We believe the increase is mostly the result of a more
popular venue (Washington, DC as opposed to Pittsburgh, PA), although it is
possible that the completion of the Drosophila genomic sequence may have attracted new scientists into
the field. The increase in
attendance has occurred in spite of several complaints about the price of rooms
at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.
Though the attractiveness of the venue seems to be more critical in the
formulation of decisions to come to the meeting than is the cost of the hotel
rooms, every effort should be made to keep lodging costs
affordable.
Regular/Advance
= 907 (GSA members = 563 Non-members = 344) + onsite 25 = 932
Students/Advance
= 477 (GSA members = 233 Non-members = 244)+ onsite 11 =
488
Complimentary
= 10
Total to
date = 1430
(onsite :
registrations received after the preregistration deadline)
Plenary
Speakers - Eleven plenary
speakers were invited; this is the same number as in previous years, and allows
time for the business meeting after the first plenary session. Plenary speakers
were chosen for their excellent science and for their ability to communicate in
talks. We made efforts to cover a
broad range of current topic areas, and to have junior as well as senior
investigators as plenary speakers. We also aimed for gender and geographical
balance, to the extent possible.
Gerry Rubin was invited to be the keynote speaker for the opening night,
and will give an overview of fly genomics past, present and future. An updated
List of Speakers is appended to this report that includes the year 2001 invited
speakers.
Abstract
Submission- Abstracts were solicited under twelve areas of primary
research interest. This is a
smaller list than that employed during the 2000 meeting. The list of 2001 topics is appended to the end of this
report, including the number of abstracts submitted in each area. In total, 966 requests were made
(versus 802 in 2000). There were 377 requests for
slide presentations for 144 available slots, allowing accommodation of
approximately 38% of the requests. In
contrast with previous years, we organized the descriptive keywords
hierarchically, so that the keywords matched the session categories. This hierarchy allowed us to achieve a
certain degree of internal organization for each session, and also allowed us
to apportion the number of speakers for each sub-topic roughly in proportion to
the number of abstracts submitted in each sub-field (see below).
We believe that the choice of
session topics worked generally quite well. The most popular submission topics were Pattern Formation
and Signal Transduction, but some other subjects such as Cell Division and the
Cytoskeleton, Gene Regulation, and Neural Development were not far behind. We were able to deal with the higher
numbers of submissions in these areas simply by offering two slide presentation
sessions for these topics as opposed to one session for the less heavily
enrolled subject areas. Two
areas - Immune System and Apoptosis, and Techniques and Genomics - had a
disproportionately small percentage of the total abstracts. This reflects to a large
extent the fact
that workshops with strong overlaps for these subjects were independently
organized, a matter we discuss in more detail below. With the exception of these last two topic areas (which were
particular favorable to submitters), it appears that abstracts competing for
space in the various slide sessions had a roughly equal chance to be
selected.
Slide
Sessions - We selected abstracts for slide sessions from among the pool of
abstracts requesting such consideration using the primary criterion of
scientific interest. However, we
felt strongly that two secondary criteria were also of importance. First, we tried to spread out the
selected presentations among labs.
We were averse to having more than one slide presentations chosen from
any one laboratory, although in a few cases two selections from the same group
were unavoidable. Second, we
attempted to eliminate abstracts for which essentially the same subject from
the same laboratory had been selected for a slide presentation in the previous
year.
Employment
of these secondary criteria was in our experience quite successful. This spread the benefits of speaking to
as many laboratories as possible, and we did not encounter any situation in
which a laboratory selected for one slide presentation expressed anger at not
being selected for another presentation. We recommend that in future years, abstract
submissions should have a field indicating the identity of the principal
investigator so that abstracts could be sorted according to
laboratory. This step would
simplify the utilization of these secondary criteria.
Two
other innovations concerning the slide sessions bear brief mention. First, for session chairs we chose, as
much as possible, junior faculty, particularly those we knew to be entering the
time of their tenure decisions. In
some cases, the abstracts of these junior faculty had not been chosen for a
slide presentation. This
innovation appeared to be much appreciated by the session chair
appointees. Second, at the time we
selected abstracts for the slide sessions, we also chose runner-ups who could
be rapidly appointed as replacements if a previously chosen speaker was unable
to attend. This approach saved us
considerable time because there were three cases in which replacements were
required.
Workshops - There were 10 workshops organized. For the Techniques Workshop, we
identified an ideal coordinator (Ken Burtis) and asked him in advance if he
would be the organizer. The other
9 workshops were proposed by the individuals listed as organizer in the
appendix. It should be noted that,
for the first time to our knowledge, the Ecdysone Workshop was linked to the
meeting and included in the Program.
Issues related to the workshops were by far the most time-consuming
and vexing problems we encountered.
(1) The workshops have something of a split personality, due to
the fact that the workshops were independently organized. In particular, some workshops are
unrelated to the material in any of the regular sessions (such as the Genetics
of Non-Drosophilid Insects, or Drosophila Research at Primarily Undergraduate
Institutions), while other workshops are essentially carbon copies of regular
sessions (examples include the workshops on Techniques, DNA Microarrays, RNA
processing, Hematapoeisis/Cellular Immunity, and Fate Changes and Asymmetric
Cell Divisions). The latter group
of workshops presents many difficulties.
Should abstracts be submitted to the regular session or to the workshop
or both? How are speakers
apportioned between sessions and the corresponding workshops? (In many cases, this was settled by
some time-consuming haggling between ourselves and the workshop
organizers.) How should abstracts
for workshops be treated in the meeting program, given that abstracts selected
for slide sessions were removed from the part of the program listing abstracts
for poster presentations?
The
organizers of the 2000 Drosophila Conference strongly recommended that the Conference maintain a highly visible techniques
workshop which will allow selection of critical development for Drosophila
research. We agree that Techniques
are in many ways now the most essential component of the meeting, and hence we
scheduled the Techniques Workshop as a standalone, with no other concurrent
workshops. However, we encountered
problems because we also arranged for a Techniques slide session and permitted
an independent Microarrays Workshop to be organized as well. This trio caused the greatest
coordination difficulties. Future organizers should consider whether a slide session
is warranted in addition to a Workshop.
Perhaps the Workshop could be limited only to the talks of most general
interest, while the slide session could address more detailed issues. In any event, better early planning
should minimize such problems.
(2)
Following the recommendations
of last year's committee, we attempted to organize the workshops early so to
allow publication of the schedule of speakers (with accompanying abstracts) in
the program book. This strategy
was intended to increase the visibility of the workshops among
participants. Unfortunately, only
a few proposals were received as the deadline neared; one was for a workshop on
Non-Drosophilid Insects, which was to be coupled to an independent companion
meeting on Nasonia. We sent a
reminder through Flybase requesting Workshop proposals. Eventually
12 proposals (including that for Ecdysone) were received but three were
rejected: two were not fully formulated or novel and one arrived late and
overlapped with an accepted proposal.
Workshop moderators had very different ideas of how
"pre-packaged" their workshops should be.
In some cases, the moderators took pains to choose their speakers and
solicit abstracts from them at an early stage. In other cases, the moderators wanted to choose their
speakers at the last minute, or from the "platform rejects", so in
several cases we do not as yet know who will be speaking at such workshops. We
emphasized to the organizers that Workshops are to be informal discussions, not
"platform substitutes" but we are not certain how well this will be
enforced.
(3)
The combination of situations
(1) and (2) above created an administrative nightmare. In some cases, the organizers of the
workshops did not know that their speakers had submitted abstracts for the
slide sessions. Often, we had no
knowledge about whether speakers we were considering for slide sessions were
delivering essentially the same talk at a workshop. Some workshops will appear in the meeting Program in a
format complete with abstracts, others will be announced only in a very sketchy
manner. The negotiations between
ourselves and the workshop organizers were in some cases very protracted,
truncating the time available to react to decisions. As a result, some abstracts ended up appearing in two places
in the Program (under the workshop and the poster session), though this was not
a problem for abstracts chosen for slide presentations since we eliminated all
overlaps prior to selection.
These problems can be dealt with in several possible ways. (a) Workshops could be restricted to topics that do not obviously overlap with slide sessions. This would be the easiest solution administratively. (b) Workshops should be organized - even to the extent of selecting speakers - at a very early stage, prior to the submission of abstracts for platform sessions, so that the participants in the workshops can be easily identified and tracked. This would facilitate preparation of the Program. (c) Strict rules could be instituted so that workshop participants do not submit abstracts on the same topic to the general meeting. (d) Potentially, a separate area of the Abstract submission Website should be made for Workshop submissions. (e) Other than choosing the Workshops and listing the times and rooms, the meeting organizers should play no role in this matter. This would simplify the lives of the organizers, but would prevent efforts to integrate the Workshops into the meeting and could foster abuses (such as having the same talk delivered in a slide session and Workshop).
Programmatic Changes
- Several
changes were made to the general format of the program.
A. The
organizing committee for the 2000 meeting complained that, because the abstract
submission date (set by the GSA) was originally November 8, the Drosophila
community was not prepared and there was a poor response. The deadline for abstract submission
for the 2000 meeting was then extended by one week, which
substantially improved
submission numbers. For the 2001
meeting, the submission deadline was considerably later (November 27). We encountered problems in that the
FASEB Website crashed over the Thanksgiving weekend, and there was no way for
us to access or fix the site because this was FASEB's property. GSA immediately contacted FASEB for
help and also extended the abstract deadline to compensate. In any event, the later submission
deadline caused no major problems.
The committee's time for choosing slide presentations was shortened, but
we were able to complete the selection process within a week. We thus believe later deadlines are
advantageous in terms of allowing sufficient time for community
response, although future organizers should be aware that they will
spend Christmas week sorting abstracts.
B. In 2000,
authors were asked to choose between slide only, slide or poster, poster only
for the presentation of their abstracts.
Because that system was reported to introduce some confusion, we went
back to the simpler, older system in which authors could indicate slide or
poster. Those abstracts that were
self-nominated for slide presentation but that were not chosen were
automatically put into poster sessions.
We believe this system worked well, except for some difficulties
introduced by the workshops that were described above. We anticipate that the large majority
of the abstracts that were not selected for talks will appear as posters at the
meeting, but this remains to be seen.
C. In contrast
with previous years, we made efforts to obtain abstracts for the plenary talks
and workshops and to include these in the meeting's Program. These efforts worked very well for the
plenary talks, and we believe the inclusion of plenary abstracts helps
advertise the plenary talks and makes the Program more complete. However, as described above, our
attempts to include workshop abstracts engendered some
problems.
D. At the
urging of Laurie Tompkins, the program director in Genetics and Developmental
Biology at NIH/GM, we initiated a lunch meeting that would bring together
Drosophila investigators and several program directors at the NSF and at NIH
institutes who are interested in funding fly grants. Dr. Tompkins assumed most of the responsibility for
organizing this session. The
session could not be made into a workshop because the NSF/NIH program directors
wanted to meet with us during the day.
Although
we have strong hopes that this lunch will be a high point of the meeting, it
remains to be seen how useful or well-attended the session will prove in
reality. One worry is logistical:
we could find no simple way to make sure that participants in this
"lunch" will actually find something to eat. The hotel does not allow external
caterers to bring food into the meeting venue, and the hotel was unable to come
up with an inexpensive lunch menu themselves. As a result, participants will have to leave the hotel and
personally bring bag lunches back; we allotted insufficient time to allow
people to do so. In the future, if
participants find this lunch to be of utility, it may be advantageous to make
this meeting with NSF/NIH program directors into a workshop. The issue may in any case be moot
because involvement of the NSF/NIH people was predicated on a meeting venue of
Washington DC.
E. In this
meeting, complimentary hotel rooms were reserved -- as traditionally -- for GSA
personnel, the two major organizers (who have traditionally been felt to
deserve something for their efforts, and we agree!), and foreign scientists
(mostly from Russia) who could not afford the rooms. We
regret that, in contrast to previous years, we were unable to give
complimentary rooms for distinguished figures from the Old Guard (like Mel
Green or Dan Lindsley). We felt
that needy foreign scientists were a higher priority, and that the Old Guard
would be more able to afford rooms.
Several of the needy cases had been selected for slide presentations
(unbeknownst in terms of need), so the comp rooms were essential for the
meeting program. We did not
encounter any complaints as a result of this policy, and offers of comp rooms
were much appreciated by the foreign Drosophilists. Insofar as we know, registration fees were waived for all
participants who asked on the basis of serious financial need. We recommend that this policy be
continued.
Future Considerations and
Organization of the Meeting -
A. A major
problem this year, and one that will continue to increase in severity over
time, is the necessity for arranging computer-assisted A/V equipment (for
movies and PowerPoint presentations).
It is extremely expensive to rent such equipment; these costs are even
higher because rental companies make rules that maximize our costs (like not
allowing movement of projection equipment from one room to another). Another aspect of this problem is the
issue of compatibility between various kinds of computers and projectors. We hope such difficulties will be
solved in the speaker ready rooms, but this remains to be seen. We see only two possible
solutions. The meeting either
needs to raise funds to cover these expenses (see below), or the fly board
should purchase A/V and computer equipment that could be used on site. The advantages of the latter solution
are the savings in the long run, and the possibility to ask authors to forward
CDs, Zip disks, or electronic files prior to the meeting to avoid last-minute
compatibility hassles. The
disadvantages are the high up-front capital costs, and the possibility that the
equipment purchased will soon go out of date.
B. We understood
that at last year's Fly Board meeting it was decided that outside corporate (or
NIH/NSF?) sponsorship was worth soliciting, but that this was the
responsibility of the Fly Board.
We understand that there may have been concern about favoritism shown to
one particular company. To our
knowledge, no corporate sponsorship was solicited for this year's
meeting,
though we understand that one pharmaceutical company inquired about possible
support and may be providing meeting participants with briefcases. [In
addition, the organizers of the Ecdysone Workshop may have obtained sponsorship
from NE Biolabs (where both are employed) for the Ecdysone Workshop's coffee
break. This was out of our purview
so we don't know the details.] It
is recommended that the Board establish a procedure so that the next organizing
committee can pursue company or government sponsorship. These moneys would go a long
way to paying
the cost of renting the projection equipment and perhaps perhaps even provide
some coffee breaks. Outside
support would also allow the possibility of providing some funds to help
indigent applicants, to pay speakers' expenses, or to defray cost
overruns.
C. We believe
that there are some issues concerning the interactions between the organizers
and the GSA that could be improved.
First, we found out only after most of our work was completed that the
meeting is billed for everything we asked the GSA to do. Many of our requests for help from
GSA thus added to the meeting costs, unbeknownst to us and in some cases
unnecessarily. Future
organizers should be aware of this fact from the outset. Second, many inefficiencies of time
were introduced by a constant flow of communication between ourselves, GSA, the
Fly Board, and individual participants.
Not all of this communication was strictly necessary, and could have
been avoided by some guidelines.
Third, the deadlines we were given by GSA were not always observed by
them in reality. These
unnecessarily early deadlines caused us some serious time crunches when a few
days leeway was in fact possible and would have been greatly
appreciated. Future
organizers need to be aware that GSA arranges many meetings in addition to the
fly meeting, so that some items are scheduled around their calendar. These points are not in any way meant
to denigrate the high degree of professionalism from Marsha Ryan and others at
GSA, who did an excellent job overall and whose job is made difficult by having
to work with new, novice organizers each year. We do however wish to suggest that certain steps could be
taken to streamline the communication:
(1) Complimentary rooms - Participants wishing
complimentary rooms or a waiver of the registration costs should be directed to
send these requests by a certain date (say two months before the meeting) to a
specific e-mail address set aside for this purpose either by one of the
organizers or by GSA (or alternatively with a common subject heading). Then all of these requests could be
considered at the same time, rather than piecemeal as has been done
to date.
(2) Communications with authors - Many times, we had to
forward e-mail messages to GSA so that they could be resent to authors. This was simply because we did not have
the e-mail addresses of the authors available to us. Such communications would be made more efficient if each
abstract indicated the senior author/PI and the corresponding e-mail
address. As discussed above, it
would be advantageous if abstracts were also sorted by senior author/PI so that
determinations could more easily be made about the number of abstracts accepted
for slide presentations from each lab.
D. The situation
relative to T-shirts for the meeting should be clarified. It did not become clear until a late
stage of the process that the organizer in charge of the T-shirts (M.L.
Goldberg) was expected by GSA to be responsible for all aspects of
this project,
including personally fronting all the money to buy the T-shirts and personally
selling these shirts at the meeting.
This makes little sense, particularly given that T-shirt sales could be
a substantial source of income for the meeting. A small amount of help from the Fly Board (making
the original
purchases and obtaining people to sell the shirts) could create a profit center
that would help the meeting in the future.
E. Given that
hotel expenses are likely to be high in most of the venues selected in future
years, we believe the meeting Website should have a central location to
facilitate the finding of roommates willing to split costs. In past years, people have been able to
find roommates through postings on Dros.Bionet, but you have to know where to
look; some people also emailed the organizers for help in finding
roommates. We did what we could,
which was limited. Posting a site,
or at least a link, as part of the official meeting page would help many people
handle the high prices of hotel rooms.
GSA or the organizers do not have to put people together themselves,
just make it easy to access a location that participants can use
themselves.
F. In the
future, we recommend that the registration form note that undergraduates should
sign up in the "graduate student" category (unless the organizers
wish to make a separate category; we think this is fine but unnecessary). This would avoid the several calls to
the organizers either asking how one's undergrads should sign up, or informing
the organizers that it was wrong to exclude undergraduates.
G. Although
organizers of the previous two flymeetings were generous with their time and
suggestions, the learning process for us was somewhat painful. There are many things that one just
does not know or anticipate in organizing such a meeting, so the
"wheel" has to be reinvented annually. To remedy this, we (the organizers of the 2001 meeting) are
compiling a "how-to" manual, which we will give to the next
organizers within the next few months.
It will be helpful if the FlyBoard could include updated information
about decisions reached in response to this Report.
H. Additional details raised by the y2k organizers:
(a) Mailing abstract books. We stayed with last year's practice.
(b) The schedule of opening night events. We kept the shorter Sandler and Keynote talk times, as initiated last year in response to requests to allow enough time for a mixer.
(c) We notified all plenary speakers and session Chairs that the conference does not have funds to defray any of their costs. We did not receive any complaints about this, but we recommend that future organizers retain this practice to avoid potential problems. We offered the Keynote Speaker (Gerry Rubin) travel and a comp room, but he graciously and generously declined both. The NIH/NSF program directors who will be coming only for an hour will be issued comp. badges.
I. Updated
Plenary Speaker list
Susan Abmayr
1995
Kathryn Anderson
1999
Deborah Andrew
1997
Chip Aquadro
1994
Spyros Artavanis
1994
Bruce Baker
1996
Utpal Banerjee
1997
Amy Bejsovec
2000
Phil Beachy
1998
Hugo Bellen
1997
Celeste Berg
1994
Marianne Bienz
1996
Seth Blair
1997
Nancy Bonini
2000
Juan Botas
1999
Andrea Brand
2001
Vivian Budnik
2000
Ross Cagan
1998
John Carlson
1999
Sean Carroll
1995
Tom Cline
2000
Claire Cronmiller
1995
Ilan Davis
2001
Rob Denell
1999
Michael Dickinson
1995
Chris Doe
1996
Ian Duncan
2001
Bruce Edgar
1997
Anne Ephrussi
2001
Martin Feder
1998
Janice Fischer
1998
Bill Gelbart
1994
Pam Geyer
1996
David Glover
2000
Kent Golic
2001
Iswar Hariharan
1998
Dan Hartl
2001
Scott Hawley
2001
Tom Hayes
1995
Ulrike Heberlein
1996
Ulrike Heberlein
1998
Martin Heisenberb
1998
Dave Hogness
1999
Joan Hooper
1995
Wayne Johnson
2000
Thom Kaufman
2001
Rebecca Kellum
1999
Christian Klambt
1998
Mitzi Kuroda
1997
Paul Lasko
1999
Cathy Laurie
1997
Maria Leptin
1994
Bob Levis
1997
Haifan Lin
1995
Susan Lindquist
2000
John Lis
2001
Dennis McKearin
1996
Mike McKeown
1996
Jon Minden
1999
Roel Nusse
1997
David O'Brochta
1997
Terry Orr-Weaver
1996
Mark Peifer
1997
Trudy MacKay
2000
Nipam Patel
2000
Norbert Perrimon
1999
Leslie Pick
1994
M. Ramaswami
2001
Pernille Rorth
1995
Gerry Rubin
1998
Gerry Rubin
2001
Hannele Ruohola-Baker
1999
Helen Salz
1994
Babis Savakis
1995
Paul Schedl
1998
Gerold Schubiger
1996
John Sedat
2000
Amita Sehgal
1996
Allen Shearn
1994
Marla Sokolowski
1998
Ruth Steward
1996
Bill Sullivan
1996
John Sved
1997
John Tamkun
2000
Barbara Taylor
1996
Bill Theurkauf
1994
Tim Tully
1995
Barbara Wakimoto
2001
Steve Wasserman &nb