The fall conference for the HIV Vaccine Trials Network was here in Seattle November 16-18. This was my second time attending.
Conferences like these really get me excited. Part of the fun is in meeting new people who have total expectation of basing a social relationship on the exchange of information. Sometimes I feel like this is lacking from my life, especially since I got out of school. I feel like I meet a lot of people, and I feel like I am lucky enough to be able to start interesting conversations with the people I meet. But sometimes, outside of academic settings, I just get this hungry feeling, like I want more information than the people around me are willing or able to give. Or like other people do not share my agenda of wanting to share data. But at conferences it is always information overload, and I meet lots of interesting people, and all of them are in the mood to describe their work in detail to me, and I get this rush because a lot of people are able to express this emotional context that colors the problems they are having in doing their work. Sometimes at these events I feel like I understand what it means to be some other kind of researcher, with entirely different concerns than what I have, and it puts this ecstatic view in my imagination and I feel like I am aware of so much beyond my own experience. It is all fleeting though; usually I cannot force this experience, but if it helps to explain it, I would compare this feeling to sitting in a math class. My math skills are so-so, but when I am with a good math teacher learning something I often feel this bliss and understand these complicated relationships between the numbers. But then as soon as I try to do the problems on my own, the understanding is gone and so is the feeling, and I have trouble with the work. It is a sort of vicarious living.
Anyway, one of the big thrills was hearing from some researchers who worked in the Thai Study that was just published. This study involved some people in Thailand getting an experimental HIV vaccine, and then getting tracked for a few years, and then seeing whether the vaccine showed any statistically efficacy against a person contracting HIV after getting the vaccine. The study recruited volunteers from two provinces in Thailand, and doing some arithmetic based on Wikipedia data I find that they have a combined area of 7,915 km² and in 2000 had combined population of 1,563,000. To compare, Seattle city has an area of 370km² and the metropolitan area is 21,000 km², and a population of 600,000 in the city or 3,300,000 in the metropolitan area. The Seattle HVTU recruits about 3 people a month for various studies; in Thailand, their network recruited 16,000 people between 2003-6. It is hard to compare places of different sizes and urban densities and cultures, but I still get the impression that something is fundamentally different between recruitment there than here based on the huge number of people recruited for this study in that time period.
There were two scientists from Thailand speaking about the study, and there was also an American corporal PhD with them. I commented to one of the scientists that there was a difference in recruitment rate there versus here, and asked why that was. I specifically do not want to put words in anyone’s mouth, because I do not understand enough about this study to be doing that, but I understood his answer to be that Thai people felt a civic duty to participate because of their Buddhist culture. I do not know enough about Thai culture to know what to make of a statement like that. Later this person said that there was some recruitment done through major employers and religious leaders; again, I do not know what to make of that and would not be quick to imagine the situation as if this could have happened with American employers or American religious leaders. I specifically do not want anyone drawing conclusions from my repeating these explanations as I remember them, because I am really shy about my ignorance of Thai culture.
Another scientist gave a presentation and showed pictures of some of the laboratories in which data was collected. At the least, these would have been places capable of performing some kind of HIV test and doing interviews with research participants. In one picture that she showed, the research center was flooded with a foot of water and all the paper research records were in plastic bins among this water inside the building. Again, I have no idea what I should think about this. It could describe business as usual in some areas, or it could be talking about a freak unexpected problem, or it could be a show of dedication, or anything else one may imagine. I am really shy about my ignorance of Thai culture.
I never thought much about US army scientists. The army funded this study, and for those who do not know, funds a lot of health research. The man at the conference seemed like a superstar to me. He was in uniform and perfectly spoken. I went to him after he spoke and thanked him for speaking and I told him that I wished the US military had more reputation as a research body.
Also, I met a lot of people at the conference. It was a lot of fun.