Fancy seeing you here!

I’m attending BIO 2004 being held here in San Francisco. There’s going to be 18K to 20K attendees, people from more than 100 countries, official promotion delegations from 65 countries and 38 states, 5 governors, hundreds of companies and a yet unknown number of protestors.

But I got a real surprise this morning. In a previous post I said I’d be the only ACS person there. Amend that. As I stepped into line to get my nametag and the inevitable conference bag, at the same moment an ACS staff person, Barbara Shreve, Director of Corporate Development for the Bay Area Region, was lining-up too. It turns out that in the last few weeks she and an ACS volunteer have been angling to get an appointment with the new director of Bay Bio, the dominant biotechnology trade association in the Bay Area and local sponsor for BIO 2004. They got in to see him, found a family cancer connection, and a relationship was born.

Another surprise: Barbara’s there free. The guy gave her a complementary admission to BIO 2004. There’s a savings of about $1,500!

So the point is the potential of relationships between ACS and life science companies is being discovered by people in the field. They know an opportunity when they see one. Nobody knows exactly what the result will be, but there’s a lot of space to be explored. I told Barbara that I’d been looking at that for the past couple of years and advocating ACS engagement. I’m delighted that she and others are getting involved. We’re going to compare notes during and after BIO 2004 and see about working together on all this.

More later…