Conference - Where kids can come to act smart

Only a couple of days out from finishing with the last of exams for this year, I was celebrating hard-stylez by attending the wonderful Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute conference titled "Charting the depths of RNA". I must've been off my head or something, but I was really quite keen to attend this, listen to some awesome international speakers and generally learn something new. Once again, the experience of this conference was quite similar to the ISAN experience I blogged about more than a year ago; this time, without the good night's sleep, thanks to several friends (who don't do med) kindly playing Trivial Pursuit at my place till 1:30am - although I should be also to blame, I didn't have the heart to kick them out earlier...
At any rate, the conference was quite interesting, if you were a researcher in all the new and wonderful types of RNA around - microRNA, snRNA, and some other RNA's with small-letter prefixes that I couldn't remember. For the average medical student (and I didn't spot many, most seemed to be science students), it was next to useless, with perhaps the very interesting exception about novel therapies for Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy (one to look up if you don't know what it is) and other clinical applications of microRNA. This was more focused on the variants of RNA rather than the old regular RNA that you read in the textbooks - it seems that, for the last few decades, we've getting it rather wrong and have not realised the importance of these microRNA things, which do not contain genetic code to translate into proteins, per se, but instead modify expression of regular DNA. A prime example of why this was important was given in the introductory speech by a Head of Science in UNSW, whereby it was noted that the number of DNA genes that coded for proteins (what we focus on in med school) did not necessarily correlate with complexity, but the number of genes not coding for proteins and instead doing something else, DID correlate with complexity - i.e. humans had more than, say, the fruit fly. This, I thought, was a rather succinct point which helped me concentrate through the first couple of talks, then fall asleep at some of the others and generally lose focus. The technical detail in the conference was enormous, and most of it went right over our heads (went with a friend, who was equally keen on this), but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.
The food was of average standard; to me, a rather undistinguished eater, the party meat pies were the most delectable, followed (by a long way) by this random ball of what tasted like cooked self-raising flour (with no eggs or milk), and then some rather unsavoury sandwiches. But hey, we didn't come for the food. Another aspect of the conference were the sponsors, which were very nice people - they handed me pens (they should upgrade to BIC promotional pens or something, pens aren't much good if they can't write), much needed Post-it notes, and even a thing that blocks out light from your eyes when you sleep - can't remember what it's called, unfortunately. That was a fun part of the conference.
In all fairness, as I stated above, I thought it was a great conference for those involved in the field. For us, the relevance is still there, but the clinical talks were few and far in between, it was very clearly pitched to scientists, as they were revising how the heart worked in one of the talks on Atrial Fibrillation. In contrast, they glossed over the basics of microRNA and did not mention the basics on the techniques used to extract RNA and assess it. Overall, I thought it was a good day out, a nice way to celebrate the end of exams, and a great way to give you a headache were you unfortunate enough to try to pay attention whilst not knowing what in the world microRNA was.