Scientific research conference at the strangest and wildest research conference in the world

Woodstock Bio2 + Night Science aims to encourage collaboration through creativity. The music for the presentations was also funny.

With a flying jump, Oded Rechavi takes off from the catwalk in Woodstock Bio2 + Night Science, perhaps the wildest biology conference in the world. Having run up and down the steps of the audience, he presents his new idea: to revolutionize expert evaluation with the help of a system he is developing, in which artificial intelligence (AI) will "supplement or supplement" the process of evaluating scientific works.

Rechavi is a molecular biologist from Tel Aviv University in Israel, whose laboratory seeks, as his website says, to "complicate the basic dogmas of inheritance and evolution". He is one of the initiators of the meeting, which the organizers called the "conference on the termination of all conferences", which took place in Prague on June 10-13.

The continuation of the first Woodstock of Biology, organized by Rechavi in Tel Aviv in February 2020, shortly before the start of COVID-19 lockdowns, a three-day meeting in Prague was held with the same anarchic disregard for the rules as the 1969 music festival, after which it is named. Various scientists - from biologists to physicists - met to exchange ideas, play games and find wandering opportunities to collaborate with researchers outside their own narrow field.

The conference, held in various places throughout Prague, and on the third day in a wooded campsite in Sobiešin, in the Central Bohemian region of the Czech Republic, the conference followed an unusual format. The participants spoke in five-minute slots, summarized their research on one slide and were randomly called to the podium. Each speaker was greeted with a self-selected song, often accompanied by improvised dances. The songs ranged from Fatboy Slim's song "Right Here, Right Now" to "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows" by Leslie Gore.

One presenter gave her whole speech in rhyme. Another one performed their soundtrack with a ukulele. The third one read her article like a fairy tale for the night. Itai Yanai, a system biologist from the Grossman School of Medicine at New York University in New York and co-organizer of the conference, explained his research to a co-opturable 16-year-old. When he did this, volunteers from the audience pretended to be "genes" on stage, imitating that they were turned on and off by waving their hands when tapping. Barak Rotblat, a cancer researcher at the National Institute of Biotechnology in the Negev, based in Bir Sheba, Israel, was physically removed from the rostrum as a "buncer" after exceeding the five-minute time limit. (Later he admitted that he was joking.)

And at a symbolic wedding in Sobeshin, two scientists got married at a ceremony chaired by Rechavi and Nathanella Illuz-Eliaz, a plant biologist from the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences in San Diego, California, and another co-organizer. The couple promised to "give each other time to stay, share their data and write letters of recommendation - long - without using ChatGPT". After the ceremony, the future bride Lea Krautner, a biochemist from the Technical University of Munich in Germany, threw her bouquet of wildflowers and danced in the grassy passage.

"We are trying to rethink science in an unbureaucratic, non-boring way," Rechavi said when the Turtles song "Happy Together" was playing in the background in Soběšín.

"Behaving stupidly or stupidly, it sets the tone for a very open conference, where we can be very authentic and show vulnerability," says Illuz-Eliaz.

Dream together

Woodstock Bio2 + Night Science is an attempt to reinvent a scientific conference, giving it a "festival quality", says Yanai. "Of course, we need a strict, reproducible science. But we also recognize the other side of the process, "let's be inspired by new ideas and establishing connections".

The meeting really had a serious aspect. More than 200 researchers - chief researchers, graduate students and graduate students - gathered in Prague from different places, 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, Arabidopsis thaliana model plant and data science.

Janai and Martin Lercher, a computational cell biologist from Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, held a ten-minute seminar called "What is your worst idea"? The two called on the participants to unite with someone they had never met and discuss, perhaps, stupid, perhaps brilliant concept. "You can come up with a document about nature! Two documents about nature!" Yanai shouts. "There is a Nature editor here! Raise your hand if you're a Nature editor!" (It would be me, supposedly, although in fact I am a freelance writer, I do a task for Nature, and I have no authority to accept or reject documents.)

As Yanai explained, the term "night science", which is 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 discovering that cells can switch genes. "There is a science that is published, and a science that dreams or appears in nightmares," Jacob said.

What if, like Jacob, "we tried to dream together?" Yanai asks. "What if, just comparing conversations on completely different topics, it will give you an idea?"

"A bit unconventional"

At the conference, 115 researchers presented reports on everything they would like to talk about.

Chaitanya Chintaluri, a theoretical biologist from the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology in Klosterneuburg, was involved in the conference because "it's a bit unconventional". He was there to discuss why a group of neurons supported in the Petri dish with artificial cerebrospinal fluid and oxygen continues to "communicate" with each other by sending electrical impulses. "The question is, if we don't talk about anything, what are they talking about? It's quite puzzling," Chintaluri says.

Sara Bologna, a structural biologist from the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, came to discuss her use of nuclear magnetic resonance to study the dynamics of proteins "and how they work together". Woodstock "shows the personality of scientists - all of us, we are unique," she said. Meeting with various researchers "helps us think outside the box and get ideas for future projects".

Yogesh Saravanan, a physicist and graduate 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 that he had an "incredible acquaintance" with other laboratories. "This is a great place to cross ideas," he said.

Completion

Music and the game reached their apotheosis on the third day. After the final session of negotiations and the poster session in the sun, the participants scattered among the camping huts and trees for games and debates. One scientist asked the volunteers to hang themselves on the bar and quote the names of each model organism they could remember: Caenorhabditis elegans (roundworm), Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly), A. thaliana (cress), mouse, Xenopus (claw frog) and so on. Outside the debate hut "change your mind", the participants argued "whether science takes away the beauty" of the world we are experiencing.

Some participated in the improvised "Barkley Marathon", based on an exhausting trail race held annually in the hills of Tennessee. Woodstock's version, organized by evolutionary biologist Pavel Tomanczak at CEITEC, registered 28 participants who ran or cycled four times in the forest, each of whom was equipped with a map and who were tasked with returning pages from four science-related books (including Darwin's "On the Origin of Species") that were placed in transit. Others conducted sessions of meditation and stretched rope or charade. The evening ended around 23:30 with a concert and a party, some stayed overnight at the campsite and returned to Prague on a canoe the next morning. Others walked in pitch darkness through the forest to catch the night bus to the city.

As it turned out, the conference was covered with a disaster. Rechavi and other Israeli participants found themselves in a difficult situation after Israel launched attacks on Iran's nuclear and military facilities in the early hours of June 13, which led to the closure of the airports at home pending retaliation from Iran.

So, Rechavi bought a plane ticket to Larnaca, Cyprus. There, after "two million phone calls to everyone who can help", he managed to find a small yacht that would take him and his graduate student Amnon Bar-Lev to the Israeli port of Haifa. They even discussed some scientific sciences at sea during their 18-hour journey, he says.

The official end of Woodstock "was really euphoric, and the atmosphere was support and generosity," Rechavi wrote later. "It was really similar to what the real Woodstock must have been; we felt like "flower children". When the conference came to an end, he was able to recognize "the contrast between Woodstock's loving and inspiring feeling and the madness and meaninglessness of war in the Middle East".

"I think it helps me understand my priorities," he concluded.