Of course, for me, this is like Cliff Notes for the SETAC meeting—what will be the big stories in the coming year? Who should I watch?

Well, sort of—I’m still going on my own judgement and others’. But in the meantime, I’m certainly paying attention to the players who are batting cleanup. I assume that the scientists attending do too. I certainly have heard people complain about these sessions—for different reasons. For example, the “reviewers” miss the hot stuff or are too general. I would guess that they are still well-liked.

I tried to pay the most attention to the things that I did not hear about myself. I heard earlier in the meeting about Frank von der Kammer’s talk on nanoparticles, from some of the chatter in the poster sessions. I regret missing it, especially after a mention by Alistair Boxall of Central Science Laboratory and University of York.

Boxall said von de Kammer focused on how properties of nanomaterials relate to aggregation, toxicity, etc., and that he called for a more strategic research agenda. That comment made me wonder if von der Kammer was referring only to Europe, or if he felt the same about the U.S. and elsewhere. I’m hoping to talk to him in the near future, as I think the OECD is soon to come out with a kind of strategy on nanomaterials. Alistair said that it seems like the field, which has been focused on basic exposure for nanomaterials, is beginning to grow in environmental chemistry—an interesting comment to me, as it slightly reframes how I’ve been thinking about the research.

One other thing Boxall pointed out—something from a presentation I saw and wondered about—was the drying cycles and the effects on bound residues from pesticides in soils. The levels of some pesticides seem to decrease in soil after several weeks, and the pesticides almost disappear, but they reappear again a week or so later—if the soils become more moist. How much could that be throwing off people’s results in agricultural fields? (I think this was Boxall’s grad student, so he knew the work already, but I’m still intrigued!)

Alistair also mentioned a talk (given by John Munthe, I think, of the Swedish Environmental Research Institute), about a Swedish mercury experiment. Assuming that climate change brings more rain, the boreal forest might end up being a perfect site for methylating mercury, Alstair said. More saturated soils could lead to more mercury runoff, and could set up anaerobic conditions that are perfect for sulfate reducers to methylate the mercury. The results seem as though they are still preliminary, but the mesocosm study was cool (they doubled average rainfall using lots of sprinklers over an area of 6,300 m², for which the team has Hg data going back to 1988).

Paul Masoni of ENEA (the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment) noted that the life cycle assessment (LCA) folks seem to be on a roll—the rooms were packed for all of the presentations. Sustainability “is really emerging as a fundamental part of LCA,” he said. While the field has begun using more data and more integration of economic, social, and environmental data, he suggested that the community should start figuring out how to work innovation into their models. How do you do that? I’ll have to ask someone. Otherwise, Masoni was pleased to report on harmonization of LCA practices and more regionally focused LCAs. (A SETAC handbook is in the works.)

I’ve heard several people at this meeting, including Mike Mosur of SETAC, mention that the business community is eating up graduates from LCA programs. Mosur wants to persuade business schools to include LCA training in their programs, so that future leaders such as CFOs and CEOs will think about a product’s impact. I am interested to see if he has any success. From what I’ve heard from Daniel Normandin of CIRAIG, the Canadian interuniversity research center, Japan is way ahead of the West in implementating LCAs. He mentioned a meeting, EcoBalance, that will be held in Tokyo that’s sponsored by AIST, Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and major Japanese businesses—the electronics folks. (Europe might be in competition for LCA research.)

But I digress. Just a few more thoughts wrapping up the wrap-up session, and then I’ll wrap up. I guess I’m feeling a little goofy after three-plus days of science talks and posters. And I can’t compete with four specialists who summarized those days in the space of a little over an hour!

So, Peter Campbell of Syngenta, the agribusiness company, mentioned the biocide/pesticide disconnect in risk assessment—the big questions for ERA should also include examining extrapolations from lab to field, stress adaptation, population modeling for determining survival, and more. One interesting talk I saw that he highlighted was on refugia for insects in fields using GMO and insecticides. Size matters. Campbell said something interesting: there’s “always a ‘what if?’ question in a world of uncertainty, but we still need to make decisions.”

Campbell thanked Paul Jepson of Oregon State University for his plenary. He noted Jepson’s comments on “agroecosystem stability”—and the need to think about integrated pest control and landscape management. [Jepson’s talk was great, totally inspiring in many ways, and I’m hoping to write about his program sometime: the group, Integrated Plant Protection Center, does work in Oregon through its extension program for farmers. The program has taken off to West Africa, training people to train others on how to use pesticides safely, and decrease their use and reliance on pesticides in general.]

Kees Van Gestel looked at the ecotoxicology sessions, noting that human pharmaceuticals have overtaken veterinary ones in the SETAC sessions. He also highlighted the nanoparticles talks, and the oxyionic metals platforms—a session I missed completely. Mixtures, especially in the endocrine disruption session, were another ongoing theme during this meeting. Van Gestel says he sees issues coming up in new environments, including the deep sea and the Arctic. Both of these will be topics explored at the next SETAC Europe meeting (next May 30-June 4, in Goteberg, Sweden).

Just like the reviewers, I have to apologize for not mentioning a lot of stuff here, in all the posts in this blog! I’ll be trying to follow up on stuff… Many thanks to the SETAC staff, and the attendees for all their time and talks and thoughts shared.

Signing off for now!

-Naomi

]]> http://estsetac.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/wrap-up-session-in-warsaw/feed/ 0 nlubick wrap up in the Kongresawa a little Americana at the Warsaw culture center http://estsetac.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/notes-from-a-revolution/ http://estsetac.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/notes-from-a-revolution/#comments Thu, 29 May 2008 16:21:19 +0000 nlubick http://estsetac.wordpress.com/?p=34 ]]> Wednesday, May 28 – So, yesterday at noon I attended the traditional Women in SETAC lunch, for attendees interested in women’s issues in the sciences. It’s not just for women, I should note! I had a conversation with one man who thought he and other men were banned from the proceedings, but they certainly are not. In fact every year that I’ve been to the women’s lunch, (the last three were at SETAC Europe meetings), at least two men showed up, and the first year, I think about a dozen were there, but my memory is not clear on that point!

The luncheon this year was a bit of a disappointment. There was no speaker and no discussion, but rather some videos on businesswomen working in the technology and manufacturing sectors in Germany and Bulgaria. It was interesting, but not quite right for this group—and like a lot of the venues at this meeting, the sound in the room was awful.

I was disappointed. So I sought out Tinka Murk of Wageningen University (The Netherlands). Tinka arranged the first luncheon, at the SETAC Europe meeting in Den Haag. She was inspired by a study that showed that culturally, people are happiest with androgenous bosses—male or female. But if they had  a male boss, they said that the ideal boss is a male. (The results, from Janka Stoker at Groningen University, are from a free Dutch publication sent to anyone who has earned a masters degree in Holland.)

Tinka decided she would poll SETAC attendees at the Den Haag meeting in 2006.  “What’s wrong with the system?” she asked, “and what would it take to change it?”  I’m not exactly sure of her response rate. Of the people who responded in Den Haag, 39% said it was “job conditions” that make it hard for women to get to the top, while 25% noted that it is the attitude of men that needs changing.

But when it came to fixing the system, 21% said that societal views had to change, but only 8% said that outdated societal views are the problem with the system. In the end, Tinka says, the Dutch survey underscores that it *is* societal views that make the difference—“It’s more important, but it’s unconscious,” she says. Most people in Stoker’s Dutch survey would be happy with a male or female boss, she explains, but that boss should be someone who has both male and female characteristics: powerful, yet caring for the people and the group.

Tinka put that notion together with ideas on catastrophic change, particularly those expressed in a paper by ecologist Marten Scheffer and colleagues in Nature. Their ideas on proposed tipping points mesh with Stoker’s thought that if 20% of people in boss positions are female, societal views on the qualities of a boss will change.  To increase the number of women in science, Tinka says, “I think you should stimulate positive action to reach 20%” — from that moment on, women have a fair chance, she adds.

This means getting more women into higher positions in academia, where they can model characteristics typical of a female boss. But how to do that is a question for another day, whether the solution is making quality daycare cheaper and easier to find, or stopping tenure clocks, or some other measure, all at a time when academic jobs are hard to come by!  Tinka, who just became a full professor herself, plans on publishing some of her modeling data on these issues soon, with Scheffer.

Oh, and I think that SETAC Europe is fairly even : Tinka’s numbers showed that proportionately just slightly more male members hold mid-level positions than the female members of the organization.  Most of the women who attended the women’s lunch in Den Haag were in their 30′s to mid-40′s.

Let me divulge my biases here: My master’s thesis in journalism school investigated why there are more men than women at the top of academia. You pick thesis topics because they are near and dear to your heart—or at least because you are interested enough to spend a lot of time on the topic. I’m still interested.

This was about a decade ago, and things haven’t changed much, it seems.

This view (I was trying for a panorama) is on the approach from the back side of the library — note the large hill that slopes up to the roof. I think the path is at the midlevel of the library, which is somewhere around 6 stories tall I think.

This dome is on the roof itself…

The view into the library … look at the photo below to see what this person sees!

Note the statues at the tops of the columns  – they are all statues of writers, I think.

The city beyond the roof garden…

and the dome from afar, surrounded by plants that don’t need much water…

and a lawn!

This final photo is a view from the entry into the library building, with restaurants, shops, cafes, and more…

Well, I guess I could say it’s almost the third day. Eight parallel sessions on extremely different topics, with four talks every hour and a half or so… and the organizers said they cut back a bit !

But I’m not complaining!There’s so much interesting stuff out there to think about. Paul Westerhoff of Arizona State University gave an excellent plenary on nanomaterials today, and I think it energized a lot of people in the audience who don’t work on the topic. I certainly ended up with a bunch of questions at the end — he mentioned some promising new detection techniques using ICPMS, and a few other things that got me excited.

Earlier in the day at the pharmaceuticals session, Tom Hutchinson gave an interesting overview of some of the ERAPharm results, which came out of a meeting at the beginning of the year to examine environmental risk assessment of pharmaceuticals. Hutchinson used to be at Astrazeneca and recently made the move to Plymouth Marine Labs — I’m looking forward to talking to him in the near future about some of this stuff. He mentioned some of the U.S. EPA “Intelligent Testing” ideas, and I think he wanted to rename it something more modest, like “Informed Testing,” for investigating potential problems with products before they crop up.

We have a “toolbox of life,” Hutchinson said, in a lovely turn of phrase to describe all of the data available on the genomes and behavior of Drosophila, C. elegans, zebra fish, sea urchins, and more. Harm may not be the only possible outcome, I think he was trying to say. For example, a betablocker for our heart diseases seems to have neurobehavioral impacts on the larva of barnacles — it prevents them from laying anchor, so to speak, on ship hulls, which could make the pharmaceutical a good anti-biofouling compound.  He also mentioned something about how brevetoxin from marine toxic algal blooms is about to go into Phase 1 testing under USDA for an asthma treatment. Amazing stuff.

Still, the rest of the session shows that long-term, low level effects may be the problem to focus on, not the acute effects on human analog receptors… fascinating.

What else did I hear today? Refugia for insects living near GMOs and pesticides help the populations survive. The Carbon Trust, a private company funded by the U.K. dedicated to finding ways to move to a low-carbon economy, is working on revising its carbon footprint label a bit (these are the guys who figured out the carbon footprint of chips). An excellent talk on the SETAC Pellston Workshop “Tissue Residues”, by Roman Ashauer, now of EAWAG (he was at CSL last year when I wrote about his work on pesticide mixtures). Metals and other toxicants may be better measured by their activity before they get to a cell–the toxicokinetics, rather than toxicodynamics. This is a topic I need to delve into more to understand it better, but for those of you that do, I think the report is coming out soon!

There was so much more that I saw that I want to write about.  And I’ll have more for you tomorrow!

John Sumpter and I had a quick chat in the hall. For some reason we got onto the topic of print versus online. He mentioned that he gets the print edition of ES&T and ends up reading the TOCs more than his students do. They tend to go just for keyword searches online. They seem to be missing the whole picture that way, he says, and I agree–I know how I read the paper copy of today’s news versus how I read it online. I’m also wondering: is the big picture also receeding because of the incredible onslaught of papers published? It’s hard to keep track of all this data…

Just as it’s hard to keep track of all the topics I want to hit at this meeting! I spent most of my time yesterday in the talks on pharmaceuticals, but kept trying to jump into sessions on POPs, Omics, and biodiversity. I have to express my appreciation to the session chair who made sure the talks started on time — even if it meant a few minutes’ break in between when a talk ended short.

As in any meeting, the rooms seem very far apart! The rooms are on the 2nd, 4th, and 6th floors, (which we can get to via elevator) with lots of shallow marble steps to navigate in between, which contribute to the elevations I’ve been climbing. I wonder what the office workers on the elevators think of all of us attendees.

I kept ducking late into sessions and standing in the back when I had to. Except for the Omics session: It’s in a movie theater, and the entrance is at the bottom so that you have to walk directly in front of the speaker. It’s a bit odd! Half of the people who enter late make the foray into the stadium seating. The rest of the poor sheep mill at the entrance until the next talk. I’ve done both and I can’t say which option is better — one of the talks I heard was pretty interesting: the researchers looked at conserved estrogen receptors in gastropods and related species. Arthropods don’t have one–who knew! You can pinpoint the evolutionary time when they diverged…

I’m wondering if the Omics folks think they are getting closer to useful tools, or rather, if people outside that community think that the researchers are already there. This topic seems like it might be ripe for a trends story for ES&T, but I’m no expert and will need to talk to some folks to get a better feel.

One more thought and then I have to run — one of the great things about SETAC Europe is that they serve lunch. That means everyone doesn’t have to run off the meeting site to eat and then rush back. This way you get to schmooze and bump into people without making plans, and you get a taste of local food and culture. The venue is a bit inefficient for the buffet this year, and I can’t say I’m entirely pleased by the food. (But what did I expect? It’s Poland … No salads!) Still, the chopped liver and whitefish salad with horseradish was EXCELLENT!!!

(Last night’s dinner: Indian food with a bunch of life cycle analysis people — I came all the way to Poland for Indian food?? It was delicious though… )

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.”

The building is beautiful. A bright chartreuse sculpture of old library shelves (right) stands outside the light green, oxidized copper-trimmed building. The structure could have looked like an ungainly ship stuck on land, with its curved steel and glass shell, deck rails, and looming prow. But it is transformed by the garden that grows on its roof and sprawls over its sides.

Vines crawl up the inner courtyard walls on steel mesh. Grassy slopes reach up to the roof on one side of the structure. The roof itself is seeded with what looked to me to be low-water-intensity plants (I don’t know any better, so you can look at the list of species yourself here if you do happen to know!). Small trees, loggia, tiny sedum plants, blooming passion flowers, and the city skyline in the background—the exposed pipes and machinery on the roof get lost to the eye, buried in plants.

And it looked to me as though a stream flowing down the backside of the building might be a filtration system, perhaps filled with water caught from the roof and flowing into a cistern of sorts on the inside of the building. [See image to the left; I'll try to get a slide show posted later.]

Although a bit sterile, perhaps, the spaces inside the building seemed well-lit and comfortable. But the garden was by far the best part of the building. (Tourists and locals seem to agree — a lot of folks were toting cameras, and at least one bride and groom posed in several spots on the roof!)

The rest of the city

The rest of the afternoon I spent on a historic walking tour of the Jewish ghetto uprising in 1943. It was a good chance to look at the city from several perspectives.

The Germans razed most of Warsaw during World War II. Starting with the destruction of the Jewish ghetto, a later Polish uprising in the city led to the almost-complete obliteration of the city infrastructure—and also of many, many lives.

Slowly, the city has been rebuilt, in part from historic photographs and other evidence of what façades and structures looked like. It’s hard to realize the full extent of what happened here. Everything looks so calm now, but burial mounds holding the bodies of Jewish fighters dominate grassy squares, and granite monuments mark sites important to both uprisings. New buildings tend to have a Communist tinge of square drabness, and the new “old” ones—with flourishes that are particularly old European—look clean and bright in comparison. It’s a bit odd.

Recycling

Another strange thing I’ve noticed here is the lack of recycling. Warsaw does not seem to collect its plastic!

Which reminds me: On the flight to Amsterdam, we were served with actual silverware! Not the plastic that looks like silver that airlines had turned to after 9/11, but real stainless steel silverware! (My breakfast came in a recycled cardboard tray, pictured here, with coffee harvested from Rainforest Alliance certified plantations.)

My shock at seeing real silverware quickly slipped into curiosity: Has anyone done an LCA comparing silverware to plasticware for airlines? Would they do better to wash all their forks, knives, and spoons and reuse them, or by getting biodegradable plastic utensils instead? I’m sure somebody out there has looked at this. Maybe the paper will show up in ES&T soon.

The meeting opens tomorrow—I’ll be posting on the opening plenaries, so stay tuned… .

Glaciers shaped the country way back in the Pleistocene, a quick Wikipedia search shows. The ice extended and retreated again and again over hundreds of thousands of years, leaving moraines and glacial lakes sitting on low-lying plains split by rivers. The land seems to have been perfect for agriculture—the CIA World Factbook tells me that half the country is put to agricultural uses, and about a third is forest.

My first thought? It sounds like a Midwestern U.S. state—maybe Minnesota! Well, with the exception of Poland’s mountains—some of which are alpine, such as the High Tatras (known as the Tatry in Polish) between Poland and Slovakia.

That Minnesota connection, in conjunction with the fact that I’m about to attend a meeting on environmental sciences, makes me think about the kinds of environmental problems Poland might be facing. Agriculture and animal husbandry usually means the use of pesticides and pharmaceuticals that end up in surface and groundwater. Large rivers bisect the country, and many of its waterways run directly to the Baltic Sea. That large inland body of water has blossomed with phytoplankton, with at least three major springtime blooms in the past decade.

Sounds to me like the flat lands of the U.S. Midwest, combined with the problems facing the Mississippi River and ending with dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico (see my colleague Erika Engelhaupt’s reporting on the issues there).

Last fall, Poland became one of eight countries pledged to clean up the Baltic by 2021—will those efforts be too little too late, and were the discussions between the member nations as fragmented as they were between American states on the Mississippi, trying to clean up the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone?

Poland joined the EU in 2004. Since then, the EU has threatened to sue the country or penalize it for several transgressions of EU environmental rules, including a controversial highway project through a conservation area and warnings over its habitat policies, which the BBC News reported in 2006. On the other hand, the country rejected growing genetically modified plants for agriculture earlier this year, which led the EU to tell Poland to desist because it had no valid scientific reasons for banning GMOs.

Of course, this SETAC meeting will not be focused on Poland. A quick glance at the conference lineup [pdf 2 MB] shows me where I’ll probably be for a few days: Listening to a day-and-a-half session on pharmaceuticals in the environment, checking in on the carbon footprint session (SETAC’s first ever?), revisiting LCAs, nanomaterials, genotoxicity, —omics, mixtures in the environment … oh dear. What a feast! It seems I want to attend pretty much all of the sessions.

Instead, I’ll be jumping between them and gulping down as much as I can. Hopefully, I’ll be able to report some of those tiny bites here on this blog.