Meetings Report

The Summer meeting of the Society was held in Bath from 5 – 8 July (I include the dates to emphasise why the meeting was given the descriptor of ‘summer’ for those of you who had mistakenly decided not to pack your four-seasons sleeping bag and monsoon waterproofs). This was a joint meeting held with the Danish Society for Pharmacology & Toxicology and represented the first occasion on which some of the Society’s newly formed Special Interest Groups (SIGs) met. At this meeting, the honours went to the Endothelium, the Cardiovascular & Respiratory Pharmacology and Autonomic Pharmacology SIGs to launch this new initiative, which by all accounts was a great success.

This was my first full meeting in my capacity as Vice President Meetings and I was in awe of the energy, enthusiasm and excellent organisation shown by Chris Garland and his team of local hosts. It was a meeting that I thoroughly enjoyed and I believe that this was the sentiment of everyone that attended. Chris and his team had laid on an excellent series of symposia ranging from a “Spotlight on Therapeutic Targets in Inflammation”, via “Signalling Pathways in Vascular Smooth Muscle” to “Endothelial-Derived Hyperpolarizing Factor”. Many thanks to Chris and his team. I think he thoroughly deserved his week off afterwards to recover!

Along the way we also had symposia on “Does Pharmacology Develop Pharmacogenomics, or Does Pharmacogenomics Develop Pharmacology?” (answers on a postcard please) and “Presynaptic Receptors of the Central Nervous System” (a postgraduate symposium organised by Lorraine McEvoy and Chris Smith). There were also two superb prize lectures given by Mike Mulvany (The AstraZeneca Anglo Nordic Lecture - The Pharmacology of Hypertension: a Task Completed?) and Paul Vanhoutte (J R Vane Medal Lecture – Endothelial Dysfunction: a Pharmacological Challenge). Paul was even able to deftly take a phone call at the lectern during his lecture – he must share the same ring tone as half the audience, who were frantically reaching for their own mobile phones!

A Civic Reception was held at the Victorian Art Gallery and the Official Dinner at the Assembly Rooms. These were both highly enjoyable occasions and I am sure that Chris has set the scene for future Powerpoint-aided after-dinner speeches! Buses arrived in due course to take those of us staying at Solsbury Court back to campus – and this brings me to my main topic of this piece – conference buses! The bus driver deposited us where he had collected us at the end of the poster approval session (which unfortunately was at the opposite end of the campus to Solsbury Court!).

It happened that the Bath monsoon season had just arrived and the raised walkway and associated steps were taking on the appearance of Niagara Falls. Sue Brain decided that the time was right to let her feminine charms loose on the bus driver. As far as I could make out (and I should emphasise that as a Bristolian I can interpret most phrases with a surfeit of “R”s and a tendency to add an “L” whenever possible, but I am not as fully conversant as Sue in the local Somerset dialect) he was quite willing to take Sue to Salisbury in Wiltshire! However, when she further explained that she was hoping that he would take us all to Solsbury Court he lost interest, and so we ended up tiptoeing down Bath University’s aquatic version of the Spanish Steps to our residence!

The following week, members of the Society went to an excellent EPHAR congress in Porto, which I attended with my postgraduate student, Alison. Graeme Henderson was unable to attend at the last minute and I foolishly agreed to take his poster for him. What I hadn’t foreseen (as a dedicated exponent of posters that fit in a suit-case) was the arrival in the post of a bazooka-shaped metre-long tube, and an entertaining discussion with airport security on whether I was taking any guided missiles on board for someone else. I will also need to explain to Graeme the difference between portrait (the format of the EPHAR boards) and landscape (the format he produced), and why his poster is now somewhat narrower than it started out! Among the entertainment laid on by our Portuguese hosts was a Folk-lore evening. At this festive event, my attempts to get alison selected for audience participation in the country dancing exhibition by the local experts (whose attire would not go amiss in the cider houses of deepest Somer-set) backfired (with conspiratorial help from Gill Sturman and Richard Green). This explains why your VP Meetings is currently negotiating with Dr Sturman for the negatives to the demented-yokel dancing chapter of her Porto photograph collection.

Finally, back to buses. The Official Dinner was held in the splendour of the old Stock Exchange in Porto, about 10 minutes drive from our hotel. Buses arrived well before midnight to return us to our hotels. Unfortunately, our bus visited every hotel in Porto in a sequence that completely baffled me and which I am sure brought us within a short distance of my hotel on many occasions. I concluded that a statistician was moonlighting as our bus driver and trying out a new method of random allocation. We finally arrived at my hotel (unfortunately without the positive bias that I was hoping for) at 1.30am. Oh for the wit to get off at the first hotel stop and take a taxi! I blame the excellent Porto Port.

S J Hill
Vice President (Meetings)