Tom Womack

Last week, I was at the PSDI conference in Autrans, a small farming town in the mountains near (ten kilometres as the crow flies, forty-five minutes and €80 as the road winds and the taxi drives) Grenoble.


It was French, so the food was copious - hot chocolate and croissants for breakfast, four-course lunches to go with the four-course dinners, and no table at any stage without its bottle of wine of each colour. Cuisse de oie as the main course for lunch one day, terrine de foie gras served with a glass of Sauternes as the starter for dinner the next, and plenty of time to enjoy the selection of local cheeses before dessert turns up.

The normal conference attractions: insanely complicated slides (this one coming from a talk in which a large and serious team at Novartis discovered that three techniques for telling whether your drug-like molecule has linked to your protein gave completely different results)



a cultural visit (the expressions on the faces of a large number of microbiologists as they watch a team of assistant cheese-makers without gloves carefully rubbing mould fibres off a huge pile of cheeses are well worth the imagining)



and a site visit to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, with trips down to see the marvellous contraptions which are beam-lines



On the left is a device for spectroscopy on mounted crystals; the hedgehog of beam-launching telescopes is fed by optic fibres from a collection of large lasers mounted on the next bench, the microscope at the top is attached to a box full of diffraction gratings to analyse the light that comes out, and the thin metal tube on the right blows liquid nitrogen at the whole thing to keep it cold.

On the right is a 'mini-kappa', a device for twiddling crystals so that they are lined up in a desirable way, so that you can observe things the small differences between which are critically important to phasing the data at the same time, rather than one at the start of the experiment and one after the crystal has been blasted with X-rays for half an hour. After half an hour of X-ray exposure the crystal will usually explode as it warms up - the X-rays make carboxylic acid groups fall off and turn into high-pressure carbon dioxide inside the crystal.

I got a couple of hours in Grenoble proper, on a rather grey day. The city spreads out over a flat bit at the intersection of two rivers, with a comprehensively fortified mountain starting on the right bank of the Isère. I took the cable-car up to the fortress and walked down, with excellent panoramic views of Grenoble laid out below me, starting just as my camera broke down.



Next year's will be in England; hosted by Glaxo, and probably in the neighbourhood of Stevenage. I'm not sure how the cultural visit, or indeed the food, will compare.

It was a lovely Sunday, so I got back on my bike. I couldn't figure out a friendly route to Huntingdon, and all routes to Huntingdon have the problem that you're in Huntingdon at the end, so I did a triangle across to Bourn, up via Conington to Over, then back via Cottenham instead. 50km in four reasonably leisurely hours: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=481750 has the route.

Words of the trip are 'foraging' and 'exotic fauna'; goats on a farm outside Conington, emus (and nice tea and chocolate cake) on Highgate Farm just outside Willingham, blackberries in the hedgerows, and an apple-tree with beautifully sweet ripe red apples on the little lane between Conington and the A14. I'm sure there were also plums in the hedgerows, but am not quite confident enough to pick a random white-hazed dark-blue fruit and eat it, in case it's deadly nightshade.

( Pictures )