Off to ASM

I'm off to New Orleans today, to attend the ASM General Meeting. I'm scheduled to give a talk Monday morning as part of a "pro-con" session on rapid diagnostic testing. Even though the world might end today, I prepared a talk in advance. My task is to argue that culture is just as good (or in some ways even better) than rapid PCR-based techniques for MRSA screening. Fun! Next week I'm giving another talk at our local library. I'll be explaining why a typewriter is just as good as a computer if you're writing something that is expected to have little impact.

And the winner is...

Ebbing Lautenbach, Tom Talbot, Eli Perencevich, Trish Perl

Last night we celebrated a successful ASM General Meeting for Division L by taking in a Cards-Padres game. We made it through 7 innings, 1:30am EDT (12:30 CDT for Tom). Wish we could have lasted until the exciting Friar win in the 13th - a Jerry Hairston Jr. home run, are you kidding me? Tom was getting ready for the Lacrosse Final Four this weekend; I hope to catch the semifinal games this Saturday in Baltimore.

ASM General Meeting

Eli's off speaking at the ASM General Meeting in San Diego....for those of you who'd rather stay home and catch a few highlights of that meeting online, check out the interview clips on USTREAM, here. The latest topics of discussion include persistence of microbes in the food chain, the role of gut flora in obesity, and the first synthetic genome.