Post Peptide Symposium Syndrome

This page represents a newly added feature, where we will try to keep you up-to-speed on results from the Symposium, and follow-up information.

Posted: Week of December 27, 1999

Although it has been a while since you have last heard from us [see Procrastinator's Creed for a humorous look at some of the reasons for this, and take a peek at Chemistry 2301 web site for an example of what the students at the University of Minnesota have come to expect during this initial semester after years and years of a quarter system], the fact is that our crackerjack team of peptide scientists, editors, musicologists, clerical assistants, computer gurus, video engineers, attorneys, gumshoes, psychologists, and bureaucrats has been doing a lot and we want to update you about it just in time (deadlines have a way of focusing our efforts) for the Y2K transition.
Lists that we told you about since the last time we communicated have been updated further, and the page about the Junior Symposium has been particularly revamped. Titles of all posters, including the very late ones, are now compiled. We have created a new Artifacts page, which includes the text of the banquet speech by University of Minnesota President Mark G. Yudof, the text of Ian Smith's brief but uproarious invitation to the next Australian Peptide Symposium, and a proclamation issued by the Honorable Sharon Sayles Belton, Mayor of the City of Minneapolis, designating July 1, 1999 as "American Peptide Society Day". In addition, you can access Symposium co-Chair George Barany's slide shows corresponding to opening remarks on Sunday, June 27, 1999, and to his introduction on Tuesday, June 29, 1999 of Professor Daniel H. Rich as the 1999 Merrifield Award winner.
Please check our opera page for the latest on our video production of "Peptide Ångst: La Triviata". This video has to be seen and heard to be believed, and includes never-before-seen footage, audio, and animations. Production costs have been underwritten by a generous gift from Dr. Rao Makineni, and we suggest that you pre-order your copy of the video (available in formats that can be played anywhere in the world) at your earliest convenience, using our on-line order form (this information also allows us to take advantage of bulk discounts).
Another one of our labors of love on and off for the past half year has been to go through all 1332 photographs taken at the Symposium and draft captions for all of them (additional links for many of them). True, some of these captions are incomplete, and this is where we need to harness the collective photographic memory and creativity of the peptide community. To get oriented, either use the photo pages search engine, reached by clicking here and/or at the bottom of each page on this entire web site; alternatively, access the photo index, reached by clicking here. (There are still a few small glitches which won't be settled until our Symposium webmaster returns from vacation next week). Using the search engine, type in words such as "Contest" (74 hits), "recognize" (90 hits), and "identify" (>100 hits). Feel free to suggest captions that are more clever, more accurate, more detailed, etc., including to provide affiliations if you think they are helpful, and fixing accents on names, etc. If you can help us in any way, please send an e-mail to barany@tc.umn.edu.
As of the end of August, we had a nearly perfect list of all Symposium participants, in terms of names, addresses, phone, fax, and e-mail. However, it is inevitable that people move, e-mail systems get upgraded, area code zones get split, pharmaceutical companies merge and change their names, etc., and we need to have accurate information in the upcoming months, for example to mail the Symposium Proceedings. As before, please send your corrections via e-mail to barany@tc.umn.edu. If you can, use the same format we have been using up to now, and color code the information that has changed, as in the example that follows:
Once our Symposium Proceedings have been published and distributed to participants, and the peptide opera video hits the top of the charts, we will consider our work done. As always, we welcome and ask for your constructive feedback, corrections, amendments, and improvements to the content of our web site. We also repeat our plea: Did any of you perchance tape record either Dan Rich's brilliant Rao Makineni lecture on Tuesday that went with his receipt of the 1999 Merrifield Award, or the seminal final session "Perspectives for the New Millennium" chaired by Bruce Merrifield?
Once more, it is a pleasure to thank our Symposium Sponsors, and note our continuing goal (in part through distribution of the peptide opera video in return for tax-deductible contributions) to increase the assets of the American Peptide Society which will be used in ways to promote the interests of the membership, especially the Bruce Erickson awards supporting young investigators.
We commend you to our page about the 17^th American Peptide Symposium, to be held in San Diego June 9-14, 2001, and from there, follow a link to their newly established web site. Again on the humorous side, click here for "Top Ten Reasons for Michal Lebl to co-Chair the 17^th American Peptide Symposium with Richard Houghten".
Finally, we provide here for your fin-de-siècle delectation a handful of links that have (almost) nothing to do with peptides. Two of them require an investment of about ten minutes apiece, as well as access to the free-downloadable program Real Player. These are George Lucas in Love, a short film explaining the genesis of the "Star Wars" series in the style of the 1999 Academy-Award winning film "Shakespeare in Love" and KTCA NewsNight TV (December 16, 1999), a live interview with someone you know on the occasion of a $15M gift from the McKnight Foundation to the University of Minnesota. The other two require the free-downloadable program Acrobat Reader. These are the Periodic Table of Stress (Table format) and Periodic Table of Stress (spreadsheet format). Finally, if you like college football, you may want to root for the Glen Mason-coached Minnesota Golden Gophers, their first bowl appearance since 1986: the Sun Bowl in El Paso, versus University of Oregon Ducks, kickoff on CBS, Friday December 31, 1999, 1:15 p.m. local time. Everything you could possibly want to know about this game can be learned by clicking here. Happy New Year/Decade/Century/Millennium to All!

Posted: Week of July 26, 1999

We congratulate the winners of the Young Investigators' Poster Competition and the ESCOM Awards; click on each link to learn their names.
We salute the winners of our various contests, who each received a bottle of champagne at the Symposium banquet (listed in alphabetical order): Yvonne M. Angell, Jean A. Chmielewski, Thomas Groth, Aracelly Guerra-Quiroz, Maria Kempe, Michal Lebl, Mark A. Lipton, Morten Meldal, Ved P. Srivastrava, and Ching H. Tung. Also, congratulations to Jean Rivier for his brilliant victory over Leo Benoiton in their championship tennis match.
During the week of the Symposium, Natasha Frost snapped pictures corresponding to 55 rolls of film. The corresponding jpeg images are being posted at this web site, click on photos and take it from there. If you are web-literate and have the proper printing facilities, you're on your own (although as a gesture of appreciation, you may want to contact us by e-mail and/or make a donation to the American Peptide Society). If you want prints the more old-fashioned way developed from negatives, please contact us and we will prepare everything and send it to you for a fee.
For those wanting to relive the fabulous opera "Peptide Ångst: La Triviata", please be patient with us just a bit longer. We will make the opera available in a variety of formats, which are currently being worked out. For now, we are posting the program: cast and characters, capsule synopsis, program notes, and cast biographies; just click here.
For those who missed the Symposium but would like experience it vicariously, you may also want to check out the Variety section of the Program & Abstracts book, which includes a crossword puzzle by Charles M. Deber and George Barany, commissioned especially for the Symposium.
For those who care, the co-Chairs' lives go on. Gregg Fields and his team have already edited more than half of the submitted manuscripts for the Symposium Proceedings. George Barany and family, together with his brother Francis and family, will help their parents Michael and Kate celebrate their 50^th wedding anniversary during the first week of August.
Two rather surreal items to report:
(1) David Letterman has a little schtick, a take-off on the old game shows like Groucho Marx classic "You Bet Your Life", where he announces early in the show a secret password ...known to all the audience ... and if later one of the guests uses the word, they get a $200 or so prize. Anyhow, on Friday, June 25, the day before our Symposium started, the secret word was (drumroll please) "PEPTIDE".
(2) Garrison Keillor, the famous Minnesota humorist/writer and creator of Lake Woebegone, has a daily routine on public radio called "The Writer's Almanac". On Thursday, July 15, his fourth item was (this is an exact quote):
"Today is the birthday of biochemist Bruce Merrifield, born in Fort Worth (1921), who was awarded the 1984 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for devising a simple, ingenious technique for synthesizing 'polypeptides' (chains of amino acids) in predetermined order. His process has greatly aided research on hormones and enzymes, and helped produce insulin."
... behind a reminder of St. Swithin's Day and information about the birthdays of Jacques Derrida and Ann Jellicoe, but ahead of birthdays of Dame Iris Murdoch, Hammond Innes, Dorothy Fields, Saint Cabrini, and Rembrandt van Rijn, not to mention the 130^th anniversary of the patenting of margarine (also known as mRarine, according to the spelling convention in our Peptide Symposium crossword puzzle).
It is not too early to start thinking about the 17^th American PeptideSymposium , which will be held in San Diego June 9-14, 2001 and co-Chaired by Richard A. Houghten and Michal Lebl. Look at the Top Ten Reasons for co-Chairs. Also, a satellite Symposium to honor Bruce Merrifield on the occasion of his 80^th birthday will be held June 15, 2001 at the same site.

Posted: Week of July 12, 1999 (first posting on this page)

(Sent via list-serve on July 4) Thanks for honoring us with your presence at the 16^th American Peptide Symposium: Peptides for the New Millennium. Things couldn't have gone any better, including the weather. We are taking a deserved respite for the coming week, but will be back in action soon to take care of necessary followup and loose ends. Our highly successful Symposium website http://www1.chem.umn.edu/16aps/ exceeded 28,000 hits the week of the meeting, and will be maintained for some time hence. Be sure to check a new section that we will establish the week of July 12 called ppss (Post Peptide Symposium Syndrome). Winners of the various serious and more light-hearted competitions will be posted, late abstracts will be listed, and further information about the sensational opera "Peptide Ångst: La Triviata" will be provided. Keep in mind that we still need to complete the Symposium Proceedings which will then go to all registered participants. A quick query, did any of you tape record either Dan Rich's brilliant Rao Makineni lecture on Tuesday that went with his receipt of the 1999 Merrifield Award, or the seminal finalsession "Perspectives for the New Millennium" chaired by Bruce Merrifield? If so, please send an e-mail to barany@tc.umn.edu, and we'll take it from there. Those wanting the complete List of Participants in electronic format should send a formal request via e-mail to the same address. Again, congratulations to all of the stars of the Symposium, the awardees, the speakers, the session chairs, the exhibitors, the Junior Symposium, the local staff, the volunteers, the klezmer band, the opera artists ... you made for a week we will never forget! As for Governor Ventura, we're still trying to work the Symposium onto his busy schedule.
Stay tuned for Symposium pictures!