Post from guest blogger Jason Bardi of AIP:

The Meeting for me, like some Forgotten Flavor from San Francisco, is a Blast from the Past

This is the first time I have been to the Biophysical Society meeting since the mid-to-late 90s, when flannel was in fashion and I was a young graduate student at Johns Hopkins. I later went on to study science journalism at JHU's Writing Seminars and then to work as a writer at NASA, The Scripps Research Institute, the NIH's National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the University of California, San Francisco, and now at the American Institute of Physics.

Even though I left biophysics more than a decade ago, I have stayed loosely connected to the field because for years I have written about biophysical research at the places I have worked — especially at Scripps and UCSF, where I covered work within the field extensively. So in my heart, I remain a biophysicist, and perhaps like that Madonna song from the movie Evita, maybe the truth is that I never really left. This may be the first conference I have come to in more than 15 years, and it is definitely a blast from the past, but it feels like a nice homecoming of sorts.

This is also a homecoming for me because until last April I was a senior press officer at UCSF, and I know and love the city well. Some part of me never left when I moved back to D.C., even though I consider the East Coast my true home. Then again, the city continues to change and evolve, and even after just one year there are elements that I find unrecognizable. The Mission and SOMA have continued to evolve into something like Silicon Valley north — if they weren't so already. Case in point my hotel here, which has a house DJ playing morning noon and night and a restaurant crowded with a trendy, techno-savvy crowd of yuppie professionals and lattee sippers whose foamy heads are finished with mighty swirls of caramel and pretension.

Overheard conversation snippets from this morning while I was at breakfast: "Let's high level this. I want to roadmap it over the next two hours and then walk away with action items."

"Whenever we get together we only talk about her kids. We never talk about my yoga. We never talk about my running."

"I don't mind him as a person. I mind him as a non-technical PM."

"Even if I am some, whatever, you know… I'm there."

"He was a rogue developer…"

"A five-G $$$ rental is, like, a lot."

And so it begins!

-Jason Socrates Bardi