The Lindau meeting is mostly about Nobel laureates and young researchers communicating. But even as blogger, if you're lucky, there's the chance of an informal chat with a laureate. In this particular case, the conversation turned to the topic of the Lindau meeting itself. So here, faithfully transcribed from my recording, with minimal editing and rearrangement, is a Nobel laureate's view of the meeting, from the moment of first contact with the organizing team to the burning question of what laureates talk about when they're on their own. In the grand tradition of informants everywhere, my source shall remain anonymous.

"The first time the Lindau people contacted me was at the Nobel event week, and there was a reception, the second night, and I met the old countess and the young count. I didn't know who they were, but they told me that they were associated with the royal family, and that they had a special event. Some of the laureates were contacted in a different way, though.

"If you hear from the oldtimers what the Lindau meeting was like, a long time ago, it was mostly Germans here. There were very few foreigners. And now it's mostly international, and it's on a different scale. They've reinvigorated themselves, but they have to bring in companies and other supporters to pay for it. It's good for the students; so [NAME OF INSTITUTION] pays for [NUMBER] students, and the different companies pay for students, as well. You've got to add up to 650, right, and that'll be quite a lot of money.

"The Lindau people send you notes all the time. Sometimes, they send you notes about meetings you don't want to go to, unless there's some special reason. Because occasionally, people have changed fields, and the people who run this, they don't know this kind of stuff. They just have an e-mailing list. I pay attention when there's a meeting in my field, or a general meeting. I want to come to the general meetings because I have a couple of friends who are Nobel laureates, and I rarely see them. I figured they'd be here, but it turns out they're not here. But I do get a chance to meet some new people.

"If you're coming to the meeting, they start sending you stuff. They send a question like "Are you willing to be involved in talks, are you willing to be on a panel". Later on, it gets more specific, like "We'd like you to give a talk at this-and that- time", or " We have somebody else to give a talk, so would you do this parallel session instead" or "Would you like to be on this panel". But it's still rather general. This time, I knew only about two weeks or a week before what my panel would be about.

"Then they start sending messages like "Shall we make travel reservations", or "What about your tickets". They were bugging me all the time, and I was saying, I really don't know what continent I'll be on right before the meeting. This time, I did all the booking myself, because I didn't know what my schedule was going to be. But when you show up, they make sure that you get there from the train station or the airport or whatever, which is very nice. They make sure it's as easy for the Nobel laureates as possible, so that you will want to come back again.

"The thing that makes Lindau unique is that so many laureates show up here, but also they protect the Nobel laureates. Many Nobel laureates never have adjusted to the publicity, and they get shielded a lot here.

"I generally think it's important for scientists to share their results and findings with the public — to inform them, but also because they paid for it, and you hope they'll continue to pay for the next generation of scientists. I try to go out of my way to do press interviews. But it's tiring to give a lot of them. I had one official interview this time. There were two other reporters who wanted to get an interview, they had contacted me, and I'd said they would have to check with the organizers, but they allowed only one interview. For some reason they have rules about who you can talk to, and I'm not sure why.

"Some time ago, they wouldn't allow the press in the hotel at all, so the laureates could relax, and be themselves, and didn't have to worry about how they looked. Today, there's the lounge, but I think they do that because some of the laureates have trouble walking around and things like that. You've seen how, after some of the talks, there'll be fifteen students standing around, wanting to talk to you.

"Once you're there, they have a whole list of things to do. You have a limited choice — you don't have to go to everything. When they had this party or whatever it was with the Polonaise, I didn't want to go, because I had to prepare some stuff. The rest of my life doesn't stop just because I'm here. And my grad students and post-docs would be upset if I don't communicate with them."

The Lindau organizers pay for the laureate's travel expenses and boarding. The producers of other events take a rather different approach, and that, too, is a topic of conversation among the laureates:

"Yesterday, a colleague was saying "Well, I got a call from this place, and they want to do this-and-that, and I told them 'no', and they came back and said 'We'll offer you $10,000 if you do that', and I told them 'no', and they said 'We'll offer you $10,000 and a first class ticket', and then '$20,000 and first class tickets for you and your wife'." So then he called up this other guy, who's a very big self-promotional person, also a Nobel laureate, and said 'Wait a minute, you've done this before, what's the going rate?' Nobel laureates in economics easily get $50,000 for being on TV. Medical guys are next, because the pharmaceutical companies want them on their board of directors.

"It varies a lot, depending on how famous and self-promotional and how good a bargainer someone is. But it's very typical that you get offered on the scale of $10,000 just to do something you would never do. One of my friends is a Nobel laureate in medicine, and to go to a place in the Middle East, they were offering $50,000, which is quite incredible. So I usually just say: If it's very important, it only matters that I can get there in reasonable comfort, and if they give me a little money, that's great. And if it's something in a place I haven't been, and they give me some money and pay for the cost of getting there, then OK, that's interesting. If it's someplace I don't want to go, and it would take a big chunk of my time to get there, then mostly I make a price so high that they won't meet it. That's more effective than just saying no. But everybody has a different way of doing this. I'm sure [NAME] doesn't go to most of the things he's invited to, he just doesn't do this kind of thing. And I think [NAME] will go to the ones he thinks are really worthwile. I don't think he's so driven by the financial aspects. And so on. It varies.

"Sometimes I go and do events where there'll be connections to people who can be sources of support for projects, like the science exhibit or something like that. Government agencies or companies. So you do this thing that's a combination, where you go and give a talk, and they give a donation. So I did that for the [PROJECT NAME], I went and gave talks to several companies, and instead of getting the fee, I had them send the cheque directly to [PROJECT NAME]. As it turns out, some places are willing to do that, some places are not; they don't think it would look right on their books to give money to a non-profit. Even though it's funny, because they should be able to take that off their taxes directly. But they can take off speakers' fees very easily, as a business expense. But if I take the fee, I have to pay taxes on it, but if I have it given directly to [PROJECT NAME], it effectively doubles the gift that I would have been able to give them personally. So, occasionally I do things that I wouldn't normally do, either because it gets you money directly, or because it puts you in association with people who, later on, will be interested in some of the education and outreach programs you're doing, and they will support it. So last night I went to the [COMPANY NAME] dinner, because they're interested in supporting education.

"I've only been asked to endorse products a few times. Well, how much recognition do I have, compared to Ronaldo? So then they will want to put 'Nobel laureate' in the ad, and then the Nobel foundation gets upset. They're very conservative, and in some ways, they're very much guarding the franchise. They want the Nobel to mean something very strong. If it's commercialized, they're worried that it'll get out of hand.

"If you look at the Nobel laureates who got their prize thirty years ago, the publicity and the demand for you was quite different. It's very much a fashion in the world these days to have a meeting and to have several Nobel laureates at it, which never was the case before. Lindau was the only place that had multiple Nobel laureates. Other places, when they had one Nobel laureate, that was a big deal. What I noticed was that even the year I got it, there was a lot of invitations, but the next year, there was more. Because the Middle East people realized they wanted to have Nobel laureates come to their meetings.

"I had heard about the Lindau meetings before I became a laureate myself — I knew some people who were Nobel laureates, and I knew some people who had sent students here. There's a difference between when you're still actively working and doing stuff, or if you've been retired for some time. For me, it's a big chunk of time, but it's a very pleasant experience. If you're retired, it's quite a nice experience to come here, and you get to give a talk for the young kids, and you get to meet your long-time Nobel laureate friends.

"It's hard for people who aren't Nobel laureates to understand the stresses and the pressures involved. Everybody thinks it's just a great thing, they don't understand there are all these expectations, and all these extra demands. You suddenly become a role model, and you would like to see the next generation do well, and so you feel a certain responsibility to live up to the expectations of the students. It would always be very embarrassing to get arrested jaywalking as a Nobel laureate, or to be in an automobile accident."

"At least two or three times a week, I get requests from people to endorse something, endorse this program, or to be on their board of advisors, or to contribute to the website. I get those all the time, and a lot of it is more than just asking you to contribute an article, or an interview, it's like: Will you be on our board of directors? Will you say this-and-that is a great thing? Will you participate in this activity or that? I get about 400 e-mail messages per day, and that's the stuff that makes it through the spam filter. There's always some request where somebody wants to have a dinner, or just to have a meeting with me for an hour — and you get five of those a week, and you realize: That can eat into your week in a hurry. When you've just been in the news, you get many more requests. And it's not because they know who you are as a person — they just heard that you're a Nobel laureate in a certain field, and they just want to talk to a Nobel laureate.

"It's interesting to see how the other Nobel laureates are doing it, how they're interacting. In a certain sense, it's just like going through a war together. You have gone through the same kind of stressful experience."

[Documentation and editing: Markus Pössel, German Lindau Blog Team]