Meetings Large and Small

In this post, I will explain why it is important not only that we cancel large conferences and other events, we should also curtail medium and even small gatherings that are non-essential.

Joshua Weitz has done a great service by explaining how the probability that one or more participants in an event is infected scales with the size of the gathering. In brief, even when the vast majority of people are not infected, the chance that somebody is infected goes up as the number of participants gets larger. I think most people are also now coming to grips with the rapid growth of this outbreak, which means that a meeting with relatively low risk today might be a very bad idea a month from now.

But does this mean that medium-sized and small events can proceed without worry? No. Let me explain why even these events should be reduced to the bare minimum that are essential. Most of my readers are fellow scientists, so what follows is cast in the language of conferences and departmental seminars—but hopefully others can relate these to similarly sized gatherings in their own lives.

Ok, to begin. You’re very pleased to hear that the conference you had planned to attend next month was canceled. With 10,000 attendees, and with infections doubling every week, it was clearly smart to cancel such a large conference. But your departmental research seminar is attended by only 100 people. Surely that can safely continue, right?

If only your department had a seminar, and if it was a one-time event, then sure, why not. However, there are 25 other departments around the country in your field of study alone, and each of the departments has planned 4 weekly talks over the coming month.  Seen in that light, it’s like that large conference of 10,000 — except that its 25 x 4 = 100 events with 100 attendees each. In other words, there are 10,000 potential transmissions of the viral infection.

In general, as event sizes get larger (more participants), the frequency and number of those events becomes smaller.  I don’t have data to back this up (maybe somebody does), but I’d bet that the number of small gatherings increases even faster than the number of participants falls off.  For example, for every conference of 10,000 people, I expect there are even more than 100 meetings of 100 people.

Therefore, reducing non-essential gatherings of all sizes should be part of our individual and collective efforts at social distancing. It’s no fun, I know. But it’s one of the best ways we can ward off this beast of a virus, and thereby protect our colleagues, our friends and families, and our communities.

[This image shows the actor Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr. Bean). It is used here under the doctrine of fair use.]

More Words of Wisdom

I assume everyone is familiar with the concept of “going viral” and that you’re paying attention to the SARS-Cov-2 outbreak.  So you understand the importance of social distancing.  When it comes to conferences, they’re not quite what you’d call social distancing, are they?

Well then, Harvard’s Michael Baym puts 2 + 2 together in the way that physicists-turned-biologists seem able to to do with ease and elegance:

“The reason to cancel meetings and seminar visits is the same reason we have them in the first place: by establishing long-distance connections and high-connectivity nodes, we help ideas spread much faster through our social networks. It’s the same for a virus.”

Please see this post for more words of wisdom about pandemics. For suggestions to fellow scientists and lab teams on how to deal with this coronavirus outbreak, here are my thoughts.

 

Ralph Evans

Ralph Evans was an exceptionally talented young scientist and wonderful human being. He joined Bruce Levin’s lab as a doctoral student while I was a postdoc in that lab. Bruce and I met Ralph at the joint meeting of the Genetics Society of America, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the American Society of Naturalists, which was held in St. Louis in June of 1983. That was an historic conference for anyone who studies microbial evolution because several leaders in that nascent field—including Bruce, Dan Dykhuizen, Dan Hartl, and Barry Hall—arranged a session to discuss the future of the field. Among other things, that session led to the organization of the Gordon Research Conference on Microbial Population Biology; the first of those conferences was held in 1985 and chaired by Bruce.

Among the highlights of that 1983 conference was meeting Ralph Evans. Ralph was from Texas, and he had done his undergraduate studies at Rice University. He was in graduate school at the University of Minnesota working in ecology. But after Ralph heard about this new field, he was determined to join it. I can still recall chatting with Ralph after the discussion session about the exciting things one could do with microbes to understand ecology, evolution, and infectious disease. I forget the exact timing, but Ralph soon joined Bruce’s lab at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (with the blessing of Peter Abrams, his advisor at Minnesota). Ralph and I talked about science pretty much every day from his arrival in the lab until I left to join the faculty at the University of California, Irvine, in the late summer of 1985.

Ralph and I not only shared scientific interests, but Ralph and his wife Barbara (Bard as he called her) became wonderful friends with my wife Madeleine and me. Ralph had a soft Texas drawl, a gentle sense of humor, and a kind and sweet demeanor. He took a special liking to our toddler son Daniel—I still remember all of us walking in a snowy field as Ralph pulled Daniel in a sled. We even shared a washing machine with Ralph and Bard—they owned the machine but had no place to put it, while we had the space and a great need for one!

Tragically, as Ralph was pursuing his doctoral research, he was struck with an aggressive and ultimately lethal brain cancer. He and Bard battled through it together. She joined him in the lab to help with his work, and we sent a then-new-fangled watch that had an alarm setting to help Ralph remember when to do the next step of his experiments. Ralph had a remission, and we all had high hopes when he set off to do a postdoc with Dan Dykhuizen at Stony Brook. Alas, the cancer returned. I gave a talk at Stony Brook and got to say goodbye to Ralph, but not really—for he was in the hospital and non-responsive.

In loving memory of Ralph, and in recognition of the areas of science that most interested him, Madeleine and I have established the Ralph Evans Award. To honor Ralph’s legacy, the award may be given to either a postdoctoral researcher or senior graduate student in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics here at MSU for important contributions to the understanding of microbial evolution and its underlying ecological and genetic processes.

Thank you, Ralph, for your friendship and inspiration.

[Bruce with three of his UMass graduate students—Lone, Judy, and Ralph—in the late 1980s.]

[Ralph (far left) at a party at Bruce’s home in Amherst in the summer of 1985.]

[Here Madeleine and I are with Zachary Blount, who received the inaugural Ralph Evans Award.]

[Group photo from the first GRC on Microbial Population Biology: Bruce is front and center, and Ralph is near the back, center-left with a big smile.]