The 5th European Congress of Biogerontology was held in Istanbul between the 16th and 20th September 2006 - my first international conference in 24 years (I've been busy) and my first lesson was: next time travel the day before. After missed connections, lost luggage, visa delays and no taxi to meet me, I had already missed the conference opening ceremony and the Leonard Hayflick keynote lecture by the time I arrived. This was a real regret. Hayflick is a legend, and his work fascinated me as a medical student. His theme - ‘Aging and Longevity are No Longer Unsolved Problems in Biology' correctly asserts his place alongside Medawar, but also troubled me with its ‘all over bar the shouting' implication. Ageing feels as if it still holds plenty of surprises to me, otherwise why be here? It is the allure of uncertainty that makes science worthwhile; the unanswered questions, not the answered ones - or the possibility that those answers are wrong. And it is that appeal that hooked me back to academia after half a career in the NHS.
Post-lecture cocktails were in progress by the time I reached the conference. Drinks were being served on a terrace behind the auditorium while chamber musicians played, surrounded by trees and, somewhat alarmingly, adolescents with automatic rifles. The latter were a novel feature of the venue, the Harbiye Military Museum and Cultural Centre. They mostly appeared after dark, emerging suddenly from behind bushes, and lived in the army base next to the Museum.
Breakfast next morning was full of delegates. This became clear once they all reappeared at reception with purple conference badges and embossed black plastic shoulder bags.
I had struck lucky with the timing of my talk. The first morning of a conference is par for the course if you are a big name, but a lottery for us unknowns. Nerves, which dog even experienced speakers, can be dispensed with quickly. The number of talks for which your attention is on your own slides rather than the speaker's is minimised, and your tongue is loosened by having to take questions from the front. I spoke about post-menopausal acceleration of mortality curves and how the timing of that acceleration has shifted in women from an age that could plausibly be recognised as the end of menopause to one in the late 60s in low mortality countries. A curious change and one that deserves an explanation.
Most of the schedule ran as advertised, though a few of the advertised American contingent didn't show. Gossip put this down to the threat of Islamic terror following recent bombs in the city, but that could be scurrilous. And, frankly, I feel more at risk in London.
Sunday, Monday and Tuesday featured twelve formal sessions, some broken over coffee or lunch, in a programme that ran from 9.00 am to 8.00 pm each day, demanding considerable stamina. Particularly for the type of presentation that leaves me thinking ‘now just run that by me two or three more times, really, really slowly' - like Ebru Erbay's work on adaptive stress responses, inflammation and systemic regulation of adiposity and insulin action. But others just zipped by, compelling attention, even in the siesta session after lunch, such as Jan Vijg's discussion of genomic instability and ageing and Thomas Johnson's curious work showing apparently heritable differences of HSP-16::GFP expression in ‘isogenic worms', which he presented under the title ‘Stochastic Variation in Life Span; Is it Really Stochastic?' - a lovely, big, juicy question. And I was fascinated by Jan Hoejmakers discussion of DNA damage and its connection with ageing and IGF signalling.
There were, in total, 44 lectures, 28 oral presentations and 37 posters. I won't try to summarise them, but they were divided into 13 sessions that toured through longitudinal and genetic studies, evolutionary biology, caloric restriction, premature ageing syndromes, obesity, nutrition and immunology, before ploughing deeper into genome instability, epigenetics, telomeres and proteomics. I was fascinated by the sessions on mitochondria, free radicals and oxidative stress - so manifestly significant but tantalisingly incomplete - and enjoyed greatly the closing session on systems biology.
The proceedings are to appear in a future issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Overall, and with my admittedly naïve frame of reference, I thought the standard was high. Only a few of the presentations struck me as being obviously flawed. But I find it useful to keep in mind the advice attributed to a one-time Dean of Harvard that ‘half of everything we know is wrong - we just don't know which half'.
Nothing persuaded me that the problems are ‘no longer unsolved'. On reviewing my notebook I find that almost all of my comments are, appropriately, unanswered questions or topics for future work.
For me it was a good conference. I came away with four or five good ideas, and that feels like a big success. On the downside, the days were over-filled. You need a heroic level of concentration to absorb that much for that long. And some of the social and domestic organisation was less than ideal - there were not enough places for all the delegates who would have wished to join the Bosphorus cruise, and the closing tour of Istanbul didn't happen at all. My hotel booking (although more than acceptable) was not at the place I had requested. And the organising company seemed to use an email system that would send but not receive. It is, perhaps, a tribute to the rest of the conference and to the kindness, good humour and enthusiasm of the organisers and hosts that these things mattered so little in my generally positive feelings about the whole event.
The biogerontology community is not a big one, though it seems to be growing -a glance at the most read articles in major journals suggests an increasingly large interest in progress on ageing. There is terrific value in having, in the same room, everyone from the most specialised of laboratory scientist to practising clinicians, theoreticians, epidemiologists and biodemographers. New angles on questions strike you at unexpected times.
I shared a taxi to the airport with Professor Rudi Westendorp who worried about the danger of losing that link from molecule to patient. Earlier in the week he had raged to me about lack of progress in reducing mortality among the over-90s in the Netherlands (in England and Wales it is falling). It was a useful context for considering Aubrey de Grey's final morning lecture. He had arrived from America the previous day, trailing journals, the usual controversy and a cheque made out to SENS for $3.5 million from the founder of PayPal (not without strings - the money has to be matched before the cheque is cashable). Not everyone agrees with SENS or Aubrey's views but you have to admire his drive and his intent that what happens in the lab should stay connected to delivering benefit to people.
And this is why, to my mind, the bold assertion of Professor Hayflick's keynote theme feels premature. Ageing and longevity may no longer be unsolvable, but that doesn't mean they are solved. The bigger issue is what we can do about them. And I returned from Istanbul feeling just a little bit closer to that.