N is for Nine

Conference day 3. This morning I woke up from a dream where I was drowning at about 5:30 am. Was a bit hard to fall back to sleep after that. I spent the morning getting up and finishing my second talk for the day, mainly by prettifying it with pointless images (no graphs in this talk). It turns out both of my talks are about nine minutes, I was aiming for eight, but close enough!

Unfortunately by the time I'd done that and run through what I needed to say I missed the first session so I headed over to the conference venue for the second session starting at 9:10 and my first speaking engagement of the day. 

This did afford the opportunity to get a better photo of the Brisbane sign. 

Talk number 1: 

Some good interest in the first talk and lots of nice comments afterwards over morning tea. 

The next session was another interesting one, an excellent talk about type 1 diabetes in Japan, another great talk about diabetes in Australian Aboriginals, and finally a talk from one of our collaborators on diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa. All highlighting the importance of understanding type 1 diabetes in ethnicities other than Caucasian (the ethnicity represented in probably 95% plus of all the data collected so far). 

After lunch it was time for my second talk. Incidentally the conference food is really yummy. Today we had a selection of 4 cakes for dessert, I restrained myself to try 3; an espresso brownie so rich it was like solidified chocolate butter, an apricot pastry, and a vanilla and chocolate tart - which turned out to be a bit plain. 

Talk number 2: 

This is the talk that contributes to the cost of my conference travel. As part of the Islet Autoantibody Standardization Program committee. We had 50 mins scheduled, started 5 mins early and over ran by only 10 mins, which for us is pretty good! Antibodies are proteins which recognise different patterns, this way they can recognise specific proteins or sugars. They can then take in dangerous proteins or sugars (i.e. ones from bacteria or viruses) and show them to T-cells, to make the T-cells switch on their killing activity. In type 1 diabetes they get confused and think the proteins from the insulin producing cells are dangerous. 

Next were some B-cell talks (B-cells are the ones that make the antibodies). Again, really nicely explained and presented to a relatively small audience as a lot of people had skipped the afternoon (was it something I said? 😂)

The day ended with a Poster Session. An hour and a half of staring awkwardly at A0 posters sandwiched between too close poster boards, trying to avoid all the people with back-packs blocking the route through. Ending with everyone shouting as the noisy level increases😂

Then out with colleagues again, this time for Mexican. 

Now it's time for a well deserved sleep.