Today started a little better... the shower was hot. The schedule was also quite a bit different. with three talks (by Aaron Ciechanover, Mario Melina and Erwin Nehar) and a panel discussion on global warming (that included Ertl, Bob Grubbs, Kohn, Sir Harold Kroto, Rudolph Marcus, Molina and Rowland). To distill the panel discussion, it appears as though there is a problem with global warming, and we need to fix it, we need to shift our energy consumption away from fossil fuels to one or many of nuclear fission, solar, wind or the like. There will be a similar panel discussion (that, if memory serves me correct, will also include policy makers, later in the week).

Lunch was at the glamorous tent out back (free nonetheless), where I talked with a man from Germany and a woman from Bangladesh. For the afternoon session I went to see Ciechanover, who made grand promises of sequencing the genome of 500 patients for each of several different types of cancer to develop “personalized” medicine. The discussion was really quite disappointing as questions took a turn into territory that, quite clearly, Ciechanover didn’t want to be in.

Dinner tonight was at the Lindaur Hof with the U.S. delegation and a few Nobel laureates. Again, my table wasn’t fortunate enough to draw any laureate, the Count, or even any of the chaperones. It was plenty of fun, however, talking to a bunch of other graduate students about graduate student things.