博士生学术英语

　　"Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings： Best Meeting of the Year,Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting. "Well,I don't want to give out Oscars-think about those interminable,maudlin acceptance speeches-but when the Editors of Nature Revie-cvs Molecular Cell Biology asked me to write an essay on "the highs and lows of scientific conferences",I was reminded of Goldman's remark. It seemed to me that rather than a head-to-head comparison of specific conferences-which is hard to do comprehensively from personal experience alone,and might have unfortunate consequences-it made more sense to examine the main characteristics of scientific conferences and to offer some perspectives,from 30 years' experience of sitting through good meetings and bad,on what distinguishes the successful ones from the ones that make "home sweet home" seem much more than a cliche.So,in what follows,I present,semi-seriously,a set of observations and suggestions that are organized into categories for which I propose to award,notOscars,but Georges. I chose this name based on my friend George Kenyon,whoserecord of more than 20 consecutive years of attendance at the same annual meeting-the Gordon Research Conference4 on Enzymes,Coenzymes and Metabolic Pathways-might have been broken subsequently,but I suspect not if you include the criterion that the person setting the record must be sane at the end.Big versus little conferences?I've been to meetings with as few as ten people-each of whom presented,of course-and I've been to meetings with many thousands of scientists. I like them both,but for different reasons,and I have different approaches to attending them.Small meetings,such as workshops,offer the opportunity to get to know people well. They allow a subject to be explored in depth. It's easy to initiate collaborations at small meetings. What they don't necessarily allow are many opportunities,if any,to sneak off 6 and shop,sleep or just hang out. So it's very important for tiny meetings to schedule such times,because everybody needs them.Unfortunately,small meetings are most often the ones that don't do this. They also tend to be inbred,sometimes to the point of intellectual incestr. If I were to organize a small meeting,I'd try to have at least one or two talks on subjects a bit outside the topic in question,so that at least some attendees would come from neighboring fields. Such people have to be chosen with care,and their personality would matter as much as the subject,but I think we'd all learn more this way.The biggest of the big conferences is the Neuroscience Annual Meeting,which now has either 50 thousand or 50 billion attendees,I forget which. This is not a meeting. It's a small country. I mean,this thing is big enough to influence the tides. Of course,like any nation,it has quickly become divided into smaller,warring tribes （systems people versus molecular people, modelers versus experimentalists,Harvard versus Stanford and so on）. This can be fun if you are a connoisseur of carnage. Fun,however,is not what comes readily to mind when you're talking about abstract books with more pages than War and Peace , sessions in locations so far apart you need a visa to go from one to another,and audiences so large you need binoculars to read the slides if you come in late and sit in the back.……