Live Stream of Human Microbiome Project Session from asm2012

ASM is providing a live stream of the late-breaker Human Microbiome Project session from asm2012 in San Francisco.  The session starts Tuesday June 19 at 8:15am PDT (11:15 EDT) and runs until 10:45am and includes 8 speakers who will highlight the latest HMP papers published this week in Nature (2 papers - here and here - both open) and PLoS Journals (20+ papers).   There have been dozens of articles covering these findings in places such as the NYT and TheScientist, if you want to take the easy way out. The hard core will want to read all 22+ papers between now and Tuesday, so they can decide what's really important for themselves.

Link to Live Steam - Tuesday June 19, 2012; 8:15am PDT

Off to ASM

I'm off to New Orleans today, to attend the ASM General Meeting. I'm scheduled to give a talk Monday morning as part of a "pro-con" session on rapid diagnostic testing. Even though the world might end today, I prepared a talk in advance. My task is to argue that culture is just as good (or in some ways even better) than rapid PCR-based techniques for MRSA screening. Fun! Next week I'm giving another talk at our local library. I'll be explaining why a typewriter is just as good as a computer if you're writing something that is expected to have little impact.

And the winner is...

Ebbing Lautenbach, Tom Talbot, Eli Perencevich, Trish Perl

Last night we celebrated a successful ASM General Meeting for Division L by taking in a Cards-Padres game. We made it through 7 innings, 1:30am EDT (12:30 CDT for Tom). Wish we could have lasted until the exciting Friar win in the 13th - a Jerry Hairston Jr. home run, are you kidding me? Tom was getting ready for the Lacrosse Final Four this weekend; I hope to catch the semifinal games this Saturday in Baltimore.

ASM General Meeting

Eli's off speaking at the ASM General Meeting in San Diego....for those of you who'd rather stay home and catch a few highlights of that meeting online, check out the interview clips on USTREAM, here. The latest topics of discussion include persistence of microbes in the food chain, the role of gut flora in obesity, and the first synthetic genome.