Sunday, May 25 — Tonight’s opening speeches for the SETAC-Europe meeting took place on a stage in the Kongresawa concert hall, which has a beautiful dome and golden brocade shields mounted on the ceiling.
The building we were in once stood as the Communist government’s headquarters, built in the early 1950s, but has since been turned into an immense entertainment center and office building, with restaurants, movie theaters, stages and more. You can see it from all over town—its height makes the immense blocks, some of them football fields long, seem tiny. I kept seeing its clock tower from afar, and it has played tricks on me for the past two days, making me think that I’m closer than I am to my destinations. (The picture here is from Wikipedia Commons.)
The hall is on the same kind of scale inside, but SETAC attendees filled at least half of it (I’m guessing that several hundred of the more than 1300 people giving abstracts were there). The organizers wanted to fill the hall not just with science but with culture too—after all, the venue is the Palace of Culture and Science, or Pałac Kultury i Nauki in Polish. So they invited a pianist, Ireneusz Boczek, who recently won the Palma d’Oro in competition in Italy (2006). He played (beautifully!) several passages, including some Chopin, interspersed with a teaser for the upcoming SETAC World meeting in August, awards for best student papers, and more.
In their SETAC World meeting plug, SETAC World Council president Derek Muir of Environment Canada and Mike Mozur, SETAC’s executive director, intrigued me with their description of where SETAC is going. The Australia meeting will be focused on connecting science to policy, and it sounds like the organization is going that way too, philosophically—one of their partnerships with the UNEP (SAICM), as Muir described it, is exactly that. They are trying to establish SETAC as a “major global player” on chemicals and ecotox issues, with the goal of finding “environmental quality through science.” And the joint measures will provide professional opportunities for SETAC members as well.
But back to the plenaries! In addition to the student and publication awards, (go here for the full listing; you might have to click around a bit to find everyone, including the first publisher to get SETAC’s education award, Almut Beate Heinrich), SETAC gave its top award this year to John Sumpter.
Sumpter is an ecotoxicologist who heads the Institute for the Environment at Brunel University (UK). He received the SETAC Founders Award from World Council awards chair Dave Arnold. One qualification required for the award is “clearly identifiable contributions to the field” in substantial and substantive quality, Arnold said, mentioning how highly cited Sumpter has been in the past decade.
Sumpter is also an ES&T advisory board member—and embarrassingly enough, in his talk, he mentioned his most recent submission to ES&T and a very harsh review of it! But it was all with a note of fun: He mentioned that criticism in a list of “Advice to (young) scientists?” He thinks his 30-plus-year career is coming to an end, which gives him license to give advice even though it’s egotistical, he joked.
I hope John doesn’t mind—I’m going to reconstruct his list of advice as best I can here:
1. Don’t be afraid of tackling the big issues.
2. Always keep the big picture in mind [even though your day-to-day work may be very small picture].
3. Work with other people – Sumpter says he started his career as a solo practitioner, as was the practice at the time, but now he takes “extraordinary pleasure” in collaborations, with academic, industry, and government scientists.
4. Have confidence in your abilities.
5. Expect rejection. [Hence, the story told in good humor about his recent rejection from ES&T.] “If you believe in the science and think it’s right, then fight for it,” he said.
His final note: “GOOD LUCK. I was fortunate to have some. I hope you do.”
