The first conference I went to after the pandemic of 2020-2021 was in Los Angeles. It was my first visit to the city. I had lived in California for almost a decade, been to UC Irvine, Joshua Tree and Palm Springs, but had never had a reason or a desire to go to LA.
After two years of working social distancing and working from home, it felt great to mingle with 6,000 like-minded people. Some of them were people I worked with during my PhD, my postdoc, in previous jobs and during dozens of collaborations, making the conference a weeklong reunion. For many of us, it was the first time we were away from home in two years, and helped by generous amounts of alcohol, there was a party vibe in the air.
One evening that I still remember started with an event organized by a software vendor. They had rented a brewery that had dozens of beers on tap. Unlike a normal bar, where the taps are meant to be operated by a trained and responsible bartender, this one had the taps come out of the walls in the bar room, and you could just walk around with a beer glass and help yourself to whatever you felt like. All of it was paid for by the vendor, who was hoping to attract business this way. I don’t think this worked out because I haven’t heard anything from them since. A friend and I started talking with a couple of scientists with strong French accents who turned out to hail from North Africa. After some time, we decided we’d had tried enough beer and that it was time to get dinner. One of them mentioned a taco shop he had been to the night before. We all agreed that tacos were an excellent idea.
The taqueria turned out to be large and extremely well-visited and therefore noisy. It reminded me of a student bar. Everyone was sitting at long tables that were shared between several parties, and I ended up sitting next to a young Australian. He was also in town for a conference, but it was different from mine: It was about video game design. I then noticed that he was wearing a black leather jacket, which was not the usual attire for the scientists at my conference. Later he introduced me to some of his colleagues, and they were all of a different breed than mine. Within a few minutes, I was surrounded by more pink hair and piercings than I had been exposed to for the last two years. My new friend was a composer, making music for video games, which was not something I had known was a possible career choice. Over tacos and more beer I talked to him and his video composer friends until I felt it was time to walk back to my hotel. It was around midnight, and the grimy streets of downtown LA looked more appealing than they did in the bright California sunshine of the day.
Back at my hotel, I decided to see if anything was still happening at the hotel bar. There was. My friend was there together with a group of MBA students, which, unlike the people attending the software vendors’ event and the video game conference, also included women. My friend happily and loudly explained to a couple of attractive MBA students why haploinsufficient genes make good drug targets for gene therapy, but that you have to look out for those dominant negative mutations. Despite his poor choice of conversational topic, he was so charming they stuck around. Much later, they scored some substance that may or may not be legal in California (I lost track) and left for one of their hotel rooms. I decided it was time for me to go to bed. It had been a good night, and a great way to banish the epidemic demons.
Nehaveigur 