BioBarCamp: It’s a wrap!

Greeting back to my friends in Frederick County from the Left coast. BioBarCamp is a wrap and now I am sitting in my hotel editing my photo captions and running through the notes in FriendFeed.

So here is my quick run down of what a BioBarCamp is all about. Day one starts with lunch and a couple beers, idle mingling and introductions. Then people write up suggestions for sessions they would like to lead. The topics were diverse, but the intent of BioBarCamp was to be a “BIO” focused effort before SciFooCamp (later today at Google), which has no real topic and involves a lot a math, physics, computer and stuff. Bio geeks just can’t get enough and we need to keep to ourselves. The crowd was really dominated by Grad students, quite a few from across the block at Stanford. A few gray beards like myself, but mostly 20-somethings.

BioBarCamp day2

After introductions a keynote talk to get everyone fired up. Not that there hasn’t already been all sorts of theorizing and collaborating and chatting about the most mundane and nerdy stuff. The Day one speaker was Jon Trowbridge from Google talking about top secret stuff I can’t reveal. Well, I could probably reveal it, but I don’t really understand what it is or how I would use it. Essentially, a new Google project for transportation and storage of massive data files (tera bites worth of data). I don’t personally have a huge interest in this kind of stuff, but it was interesting none the less.

After the keynote, people mingled some more, talked to people they thought were interesting and then evaluated the Session Suggestions, marking the one’s that they would like to attend. This takes a lot more effort than you might think, especially when there is some much beer and 75 some odd people much like myself (did I mention that most of them were a bit younger, though?).

Throughout the day, we also posted ideas about the future on the wall, which are supposed to be added to Sciencex2.org.

At 6 we shlepped off down the road to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. I was hoping to sample some more regional fare, but it is hard to find a place that can accommodate a group our size. I have to admit, the Cheese Cake Factory in downtown Palo Alto is much more grandiose that the one I’ve been to in the Inner Harbor, Baltimore.

After dinner, the long ride back to Sunnyvale on the bus. Fortunately, I had some companions on this trip. Joseph, Cameron, Micheal and I spent a good portion of the one hour (for freakin 12 miles!!!) bus ride chatting about science and the day and stuff in general. It made the bus trip almost tolerable, even with the indigent crowd on board at 10 PM.

Day two kicked off with a talk by Aubrey de Gray. Maybe this doesn’t mean too much to the casual reader, but it was a pretty big deal for me. Aubrey is quite a celebrity, actually. He’s been all over the Washington Post (I am too lazy to link back to my post on the topic, so find it yourself), interviewed by Barbara Walters (I think on the Living Forever special she ran on April Fools day) and played a funny clip from his interview with Steve Cobert. I couldn’t find that one, but I’ll link to this rather silly YouTube. By the way, Cameron was streaming the entirty of day two and you scan see Aubrey’s talk on that feed HERE. You’ll need to select the “on Demand” button on the bottom of the screen and pick the video you want to watch. In the deGray speech, you’ll see yours truly seating next to the screen with the Indians hat. I appear to be obsessed with stroking my beard (I wonder why?), but fortunately not picking my nose.

After this talk, the sessions started and ran until about 6 PM. I attended a session about seeding an asteroid with life and establishing a sustainable space colony on Mars by a NASA AMES scientist (my new buddy John), DIYbio (Mac Cowell from Boston, another new buddy), Mediating medical costs, a very interesting talk of “multiplexing” via Flow cytometry, Chris Patel talking about life extension from a more mechanistic perspective, a fascinating talk on oncolytic viruses and a couple more.

The final session was a plenary panel discussion about starting your own business. I was asked to sit on the panel along with 5 others who have experience with Biotech start-ups. Shirley (and others) captured the gist of the session on the FriendFeed, but you had to be there. You can probably drag it up on Cameron’s video site as well.