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Creative thinking

For years scientists have protested that the most creative period for collaboration at any meeting is after the oral presentations and during discussions in the bar over a pint of beer or glass of wine. The evidence for this is always rather tenuous and personal experience convinces me that the most creative ideas tend to fade with the alcoholic haze and headache the next morning! Nevertheless, researchers from the Med-Vet-Net Host–Pathogen Special Interest Group and WP31 (ZooVirNet), while testing this hypothesis at our Annual Scientific Meeting in Lucca, have come up with confirmatory proof of principle.

Their chance discussions on the best way of encouraging difficult porcine viruses to grow in culture led to a novel idea using specialist tissue culture techniques developed for virulence testing of bacterial pathogens. The idea was quickly, and successfully, converted into action by a Med-Vet-Net funded PhD student from Italy currently working in the UK.

This story, though not uncommon, has an interesting twist – the key scientists in the bar-room discussion both work at the VLA and in laboratories no more than 20 metres apart – yet they had to travel 1200 kilometres to develop a research collaboration of mutual benefit!

This just goes to prove that Med-Vet-Net is succeeding in its aim to integrate multidisciplinary research on zoonotic agents – and also that men don’t talk exclusively about football and girls while in the bar at scientific meetings!

Diane Newell

 
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 Page Contact: Jennie Drew - Last modified: 2007-08-31