The final day finally! After last night’s information download and afternoon nap. I felt much better.

The number of people around has dropped dramatically. This morning at the hotel, you could hear luggage being dragged along the corridors. And the common toilet as already flooded by 6.30am.

The quality of the sessions was still maintained. Good topics and good speakers made clear their points. I attended talk at the Immunity to Pathogens and it discussed the role of chitin on Th2 responses, correlating their work to snow crab factory workers. I also stayed in the Antigen Presentation Session. It gave me a good background and updates on MHC I & II presentation pathways and its components. The people I spoke to yesterday at my poster were all in that session. I guess its easy to interest the immunologist on metal binding and immunogenicity than to material scientist or to biomedical engineers.

Before leaving, I had to discuss a few things with my supervisor and it was quite good summing up the whole experience. I like talking to my supervisor as his insights are quite good. He was able to see the drop in the quality of research, possibly due to lack of US research funding. Also the staleness of some societies like anatomy or the random direction of the biochemistry & molecular biology people. He believes that immunologists are at the forefront of research as they are driven by questions and pull in any method available to them. We also noted the lack of work presented wrt to HIV/AIDS. What happened? Has the hype finally died out? Is South Park right to begin making fun of the condition? Overall the meeting was an excellant exposure to the different aspects of immunology. However you could see how certain topics are favoured or “in fashion”. This makes problems when sourcing for funding in the “un-interesting” work. Attending the sessions also allowed to see how some researchers are passionate about their work while others seemed to be going through the motions.

On a geeky note, the infiltration of Macs at this scientific meeting was almost equal to PC laptops. Most of the Japanese were using their sub-notebooks (possibly konjinsha), some were using tablets (2 actually, including my supervisor) and I even saw the old faithful titanium G4 powerbook being touted around. Thanks to free wireless access by the organisers, everyone could stay in touch. However, I couldn’t get my iPod touch to connect to the wireless. Not sure why. Oh and there were so manypeople using iPhones. Making calls, taking notes, snapping photos. Its is quite awesome to see the whol gamet of mac stuff being used. Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone carrying the desirable but useless MacBook Air. Perhaps its another sign of reduced US funding for scientific research.

Well, that’s all the news from EB2008/AAI Annual Meeting 2008. Its off to the USS Midway Museum and Washington DC for the fun part of this US trip.