With a flying leap, Oded Rechavi soars off the podium at Woodstock Bio2 + Night Science, possibly the world’s wildest biology conference. After running up and down the steps of the auditorium, he presents his new idea: revolutionize peer review with a system he’s developing, in which artificial intelligence (AI) would “supplement or augment” the process of assessing scientific papers.
Rechavi is a molecular biologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel whose lab aims, as its website puts it, to “challenge basic dogmas regarding inheritance and evolution”. He is one of the instigators of the meeting, dubbed by its organizers as the “conference to end all conferences”, which was held in Prague on 10–13 June.
An outside poster presentation at the conference.Credit: Nir Eynon, Monash University, Australia
A follow-on from the first Woodstock of Biology, organized by Rechavi in Tel Aviv in February 2020, just before the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns, the three-day Prague get-together was conducted with same anarchic disregard for rules as the 1969 music festival that it’s named after. A variety of scientists — from biologists to physicists — met to exchange ideas, play games and find fortuitous opportunities to collaborate with researchers outside their own narrow field.
Held in various locations across the city of Prague, and on the third day at a wooded campsite at Soběšín, in the Central Bohemian region of the Czech Republic, the conference followed an unusual format. Attendees spoke in five-minute slots, summarized their research in a single slide and were called to the podium in random order. Each speaker was hailed with a self-chosen walk-up song, often accompanied by impromptu dancing. The songs ranged from Fatboy Slim’s ‘Right Here, Right Now’ to ‘Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows’ by Lesley Gore.
One presenter gave her entire talk in rhyme. Another soundtracked theirs with a ukulele. A third read her paper as a bedtime story. Itai Yanai, a systems biologist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine in New York City and a conference co-organizer, explained his research to a co-opted 16-year-old. As he did so, volunteers from the audience posed onstage as ‘genes’, imitating being turned on and off by waving their arms when tapped. Barak Rotblat, a cancer researcher at the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev, based in Beersheba, Israel, was physically removed from the podium by a ‘bouncer’ after exceeding the five-minute time limit. (He later admitted that he was in on the joke.)
And in a symbolic wedding at Soběšín, two affianced scientists ’married’ in a ceremony presided over by Rechavi and Natanella Illouz-Eliaz, a plant biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego, California, and another co-organizer. The pair promised to “give each other tenure, share their data and write recommendation letters — long ones — without using ChatGPT”. After the ceremony, bride-to-be Lea Krautner, a biochemist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, tossed her bouquet of wildflowers and danced down the grassy aisle.
“We are trying to reimagine science in a non-bureaucratic, non-boring way,” Rechavi said as the Turtles’ song ‘Happy Together’ played in the background at Soběšín.
Attendees arrive at a conference venue by train.Credit: Pavel Tomancak
“By acting silly or goofy, it sets the tone for a very open conference where we can be very authentic and show vulnerability,” says Illouz-Eliaz.
Dreaming together
Woodstock Bio2 + Night Science is an attempt to reinvent the scientific conference, giving it a “festival-like quality”, says Yanai. “Of course, we want rigorous, reproducible science. But we’re also acknowledging the other side of the process, of ‘let’s be inspired to have new ideas and make connections’.”
The meeting did have a serious aspect. More than 200 researchers — principal investigators, PhD students and postdocs — converged on Prague from diverse locales, including Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Czech Republic, Germany and Italy. They presented research on flatworms, cancer biology, melanoma metastasis, brain organoids, the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and data science.
Yanai and Martin Lercher, a computational cell biologist at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany, led a ten-minute workshop titled ‘What is Your Worst Idea’? The two exhorted participants to pair with someone they had never met and discuss a possibly stupid, possibly brilliant concept. “You may come up with a Nature paper! Two Nature papers!” shouts Yanai. “There is a Nature editor here! Raise your hand if you are a Nature editor!” (That would be me, ostensibly, although I’m actually a freelance writer, on assignment for Nature, and have no power to accept or reject papers.)
Rechavi delivers a presentation read as a bedtime storyCredit: Itai Yanai
As Yanai explained, the term night science, which bookends the official name of the conference, was coined by the late biologist François Jacob, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that cells can switch genes on and off. “There’s the science that gets published and the science that is dreamt or appears in nightmares,” Jacob said.
What if, like Jacob, “we tried to daydream together?” Yanai asks. “What if, simply by juxtaposing talks on completely different topics, it would give you an idea?”
‘A bit unconventional’
At the conference, 115 researchers presented talks on anything they wished to speak about.
Chaitanya Chintaluri, a theoretical biologist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg, was drawn to the conference because “it’s a bit unconventional”. He was there to discuss why a collection of neurons, kept alive in a Petri dish with the aid of artificial cerebrospinal fluid and oxygen, continue to ‘chat’ to each other by sending out electrical impulses. “The question is, if there is nothing to talk about, what are they going on about? It’s quite perplexing,” Chintaluri says.
Many of Woodstock Bio’s sessions were held outsideCredit: Daniel Żarski, InLife, PL
Sara Bologna, a structural biologist at the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, had come to discuss her use of nuclear magnetic resonance to study the dynamics of proteins “and how they play together”. Woodstock “shows the personality of scientists — all of us, we are unique”, she said. Meeting diverse researchers “helps us think out of the box and get ideas for future projects”.
Yogesh Saravanan, a physicist and PhD student based in Marseille at Inserm, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, is trying to understand the physics and material properties of cancer cells. At the conference, Saravanan felt he had “an incredible exposure” to other labs. “It’s a great place for the intersection of ideas,” he said.
