World’s Largest Scientific Gathering Descends Upon Boston

For those of you planning on traveling around Boston this Presidents’ Day weekend, here’s a heads-up: you may easily brush shoulders with some of the world’s most preeminent scientists and thinkers. They’ll be rushing about the Hynes Convention Center and its adjacent buildings, making their way to the various symposia, workshops, and lectures offered by this year’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and the publisher of Science magazine. (http://www.sciencemag.org) The theme of the world’s largest general science conference for 2008 is “Science and Technology From a Global Perspective,” in order to reflect the global nature of scientific debate today. Last year’s theme was “Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being,” and the summit took place in San Francisco.

This year’s meeting, which runs from February 14-18, features guests ranging from the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, to Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child program. The conference typically attracts roughly 10,000 attendees and 1,000 journalists each year, with over 60 countries represented, estimates Wired magazine. Various exhibits and lectures will be open to the public, and not only families, researchers, and science aficionados, but also recruiters will drop in on this summit. It’s exciting to see that symposia with titles such as “Food and Fuel: Biofuels, Development, and a Sustainable Bioeconomy” and “Global Warming Heats Up: How the Media Covers Climate Change” have been placed on equal footing with events devoted to fighting global obesity and to the diffusion of nanotechnology.

However, the question now isn’t whether or not scientists believe anthropogenic climate change is important—a sizable majority do agree on its existence and on the magnitude of its effects, after all—but rather, what effect will this meeting have on those who will shape international policy to come? What new discoveries does it promise, and will it deliver? Will it be simply a congregation of scientific minds as they discuss their research and lecture to one another? Or will these big ideas also affect big changes? A search on the San Francisco Chronicle website of last year’s conference revealed little, only an article or two describing lectures the scientists gave to the interested public. Education is of course paramount, but I’m interested in seeing something that could bring more than just those 1,000 journalists back, year after year, in search of the next big breakthrough.