A midsummer night's dream

It's your first Gordon conference. You've milled around at Logan Airport with hundreds of other scientists and scrambled onto the big green buses. You've made the compulsory stop at the New Hampshire State Liquor store and watched scientists you've idolized buy two fifths of Jack Daniels that they plan to finish by Thursday. night. You've checked in at the school that looks like a minimum security prison where your meeting is being held and put your bag in the room where mosquitoes the size of humming birds will attack you for the next five nights. Now it's time for the opening social. You walk across the green of the baseball diamond, as the evening sun lights up the tall white New England steeple in the distance. You grab a cold beer, courtesy of a friendly biotech company, and settle back to watch the action. Because this is 1995. The year when journals stopped sending 6ut measly letters of acceptance, and started sending out medals on ribbons instead. No need to read the letter from Cell or Nature to see if your paper made it. Just shake the envelope and see if it jingles. And of course, since it's science and more is better, the editors made it retroactive. So now you're waiting for the big guns to walk in behind the rows of medals on their chests. In academia the medals are on sweatshirts and T-shirts instead of dress tunics, and the learned feet are shod in running shoes or high-tops, instead of riding boots. But the interactions amongst their bearers are just as tense as those of generals on the eve of battle. You can watch famous eyes scanning famous chests, and wondering "Do they have more than I do?". And see precocious graduate students with their own row of medals sizing up prospective post-doctoral mentors by their glitter and being sized up in return. Everyone waits for that rarest of moments, the arrival of an editor. No buses or jangling medals for them. Instead they arrive in a refined automobile, sport an impeccably unadorned tweed jacket, and luxuriate in the awed hush that greets their entry. Could Napoleon surrounded by the fawning royalty of Europe have looked any finer than an editor flocked by National Academy members and Friends of the Right Sort? Later, in the bar, there'll be war stories. You'll listen quietly at an adjoining table, …