19 November 2015, 3 pm
For the first time ever, I am at the annual Life Sciences Conference. This is almost as good as the main CIPA Congress, but better attended and with a lower entrance fee, the two facts being potentially related. People come back to this conference year after year, to meet with old friends and exchange news about mitochondrial DNA, telomeres and pluripotency. I try to look as though I understand the presentations. I don’t, of course. I have no idea what nucleotides and primers are, or why you can have a certain percentage of homology and still get away with it, and I have a great deal of sympathy with the Australian courts which have apparently just decided that DNA sequences are not molecules at all, they are just pieces of code, which means they are effectively pretty much like computer programs, because they have no effect until you put them into cells like computer programs have no effect until you put them into computers, and so nucleotides must be unpatentable after all. Quite right. You should only be able to patent proper molecules with hexagons in them. Or perhaps I have misunderstood. After lunch there is a speaking slot which is affectionately known, to those of us who often get asked to speak in it, as the Graveyard Slot. My job in today’s Graveyard Slot is to provide a ten minute update about CIPA. I am imagining how keen the delegates are likely to be, straight after their lunch, to hear an update about a Chartered Institute from someone who doesn’t know a nuclease from a protease. So I feel I have nothing to lose. And I lose it manfully by doing a pirate-themed talk which is only a little way short of a pantomime sketch. I wave a plastic cutlass, I put on a thick Wess Curntry accent, and I talk about the narrrsty poyrrrates that can be seen from the crow’s nest of The Good Ship CIPA. As in Cardiff last week, I tell the audience about The Rocks of Referendum and Das Gute Schiff Rumtopf and the IPReg patrol boat called The Happy Heap. But because people just looked bored about that in Cardiff last week, I liven things up by rummaging through my bag for props. I draw out: my Presidential eye patch (which allows me, I say, to turn a blind eye to the overproof rum); my Presidential beard (which allows me, I say, to turn up to Council meetings incognito and actually get my views heard); my pirate treasure; my pirate bottle of rum; and quite a lot of straw. Oh, and a copy of the CIPA Strategic Plan. These props come from diverse sources: a dressing-up box, Amazon®, Mr Davies’s local pet shop, my wardrobe and the CIPA stationery cupboard. No prizes for guessing which is which. During my talk, people laugh a lot. I’m not sure you should laugh at your Institute President, but on the plus side, at least they are still awake at the end of the Graveyard Slot. I gather up the fallen bits of straw, so that the lectern isn’t too messy for the next speaker, and return to my seat to pretend to understand proteases.
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