Meeting expectations

摘要

This week, Nature publishes the last in a series of essays on 'Meetings that Changed the World', with an account of a conference held in 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that helped launch the human genome project (see page 876). The meetings highlighted in the series were unusual in that they deployed the latest science in support of larger goals. Yet most scientific meetings do not aspire to such heights. Indeed, scientists these days rarely expect to hear much new science at a conference; rather, the greatest value of meetings comes from interaction and networking. At the same time, there are now so many meetings that it is impossible for scientists to attend more than a fraction of what is on offer. So are scientific meetings really necessary?