Join Taylor Cool, a T32 fellow and UCSC alumnus now excelling as a Postdoc at Stanford, as they share a captivating narrative of their journey to the esteemed Annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. Currently immersed in groundbreaking research on the “Role of the Microenvironment in Targeted Hematopoietic Stem Cell (HSC) Depletion Using Anti-CD117 Monoclonal Antibodies (mAbs)” Taylor’s project has recently transitioned to the U2C-TL1 mechanism, marking a significant stride in their scientific career!
I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend the Annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Bavaria, Germany earlier this summer. I was nominated by two of my thesis advisors (Camilla Forsberg and Martha Zuniga) in 2021, but unfortunately due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held remotely that year. Thankfully, they gave the fellows from that year an opportunity to attend a future meeting in person and so I was able to finally go in June of 2023.
I will never forget the anticipation on the plane ride over to Germany. I hadn’t been to Europe since well before COVID had started and this was for something so special that I had butterflies the whole way there. My dad had decided last minute to join me on the trip to enjoy cycling around Germany and exploring while I attended the meeting. I kept wondering who else on the plane might be a fellow “young scientist” or even a laureate. As fate would have it, I ended up sitting next to another UC President’s Fellow from UC Davis (Raman Goyal) and we chatted about our research, families, and things we were looking forward to at the meeting. I had a two-hour layover in Frankfurt and decided to pass my time reading. This time, my terminal was way at the end of the airport and there only seemed to be about 50 people waiting to get on the flight to Friedrichshafen. I looked up from my book and there was this woman with a very familiar face sitting directly in front of me. I awkwardly kept looking down at my book, and then scanning the room, and then checking her face again to see if I could place where I knew her from….. and then it hit me. “Are you Emmanuelle Charpentier?” I asked her. She looked up from her book startled and confused and nodded, as if shocked that I recognized her. I hit my dad sitting next to me reading his newspaper and whispered “it’s CRISPR” and my dad looked up equally star-struck as me since I had talked about being excited to see her the entire way to the airport. We spent the next hour talking about everything from science, to her experience living in New York and now Berlin, to politics. It was one of the most memorable experiences of the entire trip and I hadn’t even made it to Lindau yet.
The meeting was equally exciting. I met so many incredible young scientists from all over the world. We shared in our sciences but also our lives and cultures. The meeting consisted of lectures, agora talks, open exchanges, and social events. While it was incredible to see the laureates present their research and career trajectory to receive the Nobel prize, the open exchanges were much more intimate and memorable. It was an opportunity to ask them about
everything from having a successful postdoc to starting your lab to raising a family while striving towards scientific success. One common theme I took with me is that every single laureate echoed that they went through some phase of growing pains to end up where they were and not to be discouraged along the way. Besides the fantastic science that led to the Nobel prizes for these laureates, the central themes of this year’s meeting were climate change and artificial intelligence (AI). Many of the talks focused on the impact we not only have as scientists but also our ethical obligations around those topics. I think all of us left the meeting feeling some sense of obligation to at least continue these tough conversations or consider how our research impacts the world around us.Out of all the people at the meeting, only one person had been to Lindau twice, once as a
Taylor Cool, Ph.D., Postdoctoral scholar @ Stanford University
young scientist and once as a Laureate. Morten Meldal who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry had also been invited as a young scientist in 1986. I think most of us young scientists left wondering if we too might be back to Lindau someday.