Early mornings are not a particularly welcome occurrence at the Lindau Nobel Laureate meetings: the sheer amount of fascinating activities going on during the day and way into the night mean that an early rise generally means bleary eyes and a head full of fog! However the breakfast hosted by Mars, Inc on board the MS Lindau in Lindau harbour was certainly worth the pain of the 7.15am start. The brekky itself was fine - the usual continental selection of delights to help kick start your morning, much appreciated by the young researchers many of whom were staying at accommodation where breakfast was not provide – but the real highlight came with the discussion session afterwards.

Smoothly chaired by Adam Smith(Editor-in-Chief of Nobel.org and ex-editor of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery) the panel consisted of Howard Shapiro, who heads up Mars’ plant science research activities, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for medicine and a young researcher from UCLA, Tanya Pedrossian. It didn’t look promising at the start when the PA decided to go in to meltdown, momentarily leaving the expectant audience bemused and annoyed. However a working microphone was located relatively quickly and proceedings kicked off with an interesting contribution from Dr Shapiro, focussed on his team’s collaboration with the US Dept of Agriculture and IBM (among others) to sequence the cocoa tree genome and the implications that that work could have for society, particularly for the millions of rural workers in tropical nations around the world that rely on this tree for their livelihood.

Howard Shapiro, Mars’ plant science research; Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for medicine and a young researcher from UCLA, Tanya Pedrossian

The subsequent panel discussion, ably guided by Adam Smith, ranged widely as you’d expect from a topic as broad as “How can science serve society?”. Prof Barré-Sinoussi picked up on many of themes from her excellent address on the opening day of the meeting, exploring the societal implications of her Nobel-prize winning work identifying HIV and subsequent efforts to deal with the viral menace across the globe. As you might expect in front of crowd of her peers and sitting next to some eminent and experienced scientists, Tanya Pedrossian was initially very nervous. However she got over her nerves pretty quickly and indeed her contributions kicked of some of the most interesting discussions between the panel particularly those on what makes a good scientific collaboration (complementary, communication and trust were the take-homes from the panel), whether scientists should be evaluated by criteria that move beyond their publications and how young scientists should balance the pressure to put their research data in the public domain as soon as possible with the understandable inclination not to do so before they have analysed and written-up this data to ensure they get full credit for their work.

Question time at the end of the discussion showed just how much the young researchers attending engaged in the topic in general and the panel discussions in particular. Only a few questions were possible in the time available (truncated due the the earlier PA shenanigans) but the passion and enthusiasm on display almost made up for this. Given the small forest of hands going up from those that wanted to ask the panel something at the end, the Q&A could have probably been extended for another couple of hours without losing too much steam.

So all-in-all a great way to start the day…with the added bonus of those free packets of special Lindau-branded M&Ms (“how do they get that logo on each individual candy?” was going to be my question!).