Well, it turns out that a few molecular evolutionists come along to read this blog from time to time, so it’s not entirely inappropriate to write a short review of SMBE 2008.

Overall, the venue (Barcelona) was great as was the conference venue.  The company that were organising the meeting were really professional and I didn’t notice a single glitch in the meeting.

However, there were a few things that didn’t make me too happy.

First of all, there were far too few invited speakers.  For each session, there seemed to be only a single invited speaker and the rest were contributed talks.  This means that the majority of the talks were by post-grad students and post-docs who were simply too inexperienced to answer difficult questions (I got a one-word answer to one of my questions - the word was yes - and it seemed that the speaker was terrified).  This contrasts with other SMBE meeting that I have attended where there were maybe six speakers in a session and four of them were seasoned speakers that were talking about multiple studies from their labs.  These kinds of talk are very useful summaries of thd state-of-play in a particular dicsipline.  What we had in Barcelona for the most part were single-study talks by relatively inexperienced researchers.  It was probably great for the speakers, but for me this was the weak point of the meeting.

The meeting cost me 520.00 Euro to register - I didn’t make the early registration - and this was far too much for a meeting that was predominantly early-stage researchers.

Overall, I am a little disappointed, not by the professionalism of the organisers, but by the scientific content of the meeting.

John Logsdon is organising the meeting next year in Iowa.  So, John - I know you read this blog - step up to it

Comments welcome.