The Conference To End All Conferences: "Woodstock.Bio2 + Night Science"

The most ridiculous, wild, and awesome academic conference ever! 🤪😂 LOL

Just look at the hashtag they used: #TheConferenceToEndAllConferences  💥. "The conference to end all conferences" - how cool is that?! 🤩 (You should also check out the other hashtag on X/BlueSky: #TCTeAC). The real name of the event is Woodstock.Bio² + Night Science

I was following Prof. Rechavi and Prof. Yanai's X accounts, and the hashtag says "conference," but the pictures… people on stage playing guitars? 🎸 Is this a concert or what? 🤯 They were even putting up posters in the middle of the forest! 🌲 It's just so damn cool. 😎 

Even Nature Career just wrote an article about it! 📰 (But you can find all the sick photos by following the hashtags on X). This event brought together all kinds of disciplines, from biology all the way to physics 🔬⚛️, and included everyone from PhD students to professors. 👩‍🎓👨‍🏫

 

💥 The Presentation Theme 💥

Each speaker had to present their work in 5 minutes using only one slide. ⏱️ The speakers were chosen randomly, and they all got to walk on stage to an intro song of their choice LOL. 🎶 They even made a Spotify playlist of all the songs! 🎧 Seriously, so extra.

 

If I'd been there, I would've used the Doraemon intro song, hahaha. 🤖

And the presentations themselves? Some were in the form of poetry or rhyming verses. ✍️ Some had a ukulele soundtrack. 🎸 One person told their research as a bedtime story, and someone else was literally sprawled out on the floor in front of the podium during the talk LOL. 🤣

 

And remember how I said professors were there? One of them was Prof. Yanai, one of the heads of this whole thing, and he's a legend. He had volunteers stand on stage to act as "genes" and wave their arms to show when the gene was turned "on" or "off." 🧬 This is so freaking cool. From a biologist's perspective, you might think, "Well, we already understand that," but just imagine the look on a physicist's face! 😮 The point was to make sure everyone understood. 💡

👉 I love what Illouz-Eliaz said:

"Making fun of ourselves or being silly makes for a more open atmosphere at the meeting, a place where we can be ourselves and show our vulnerability." 💖

👉 And what Prof. Yanai said:

"Of course we need rigorous and reproducible science, but we also acknowledge the other side of the process: 'Let’s find inspiration to create new ideas and make connections.'" ✨

"What happens if just giving a lecture on a completely different topic gives you a new idea?" 🧠

  

This is all about 🌜 Night Science (a term that originated with François Jacob, a 1965 Nobel laureate in medicine). Night Science is the free-form, unstructured thought process that leads to 🌞 Day Science—the work we actually do, the hypotheses we test in a beautiful, step-by-step manner. 📝

 

😝 And the closing ceremony was just as epic! They went on a scavenger hunt for Darwin's papers! 🏃‍♀️🏃

The conference ended with a poster session in the woods, games, music, debates, and even a trail run with that scavenger hunt. 🏞️ OMG!! 😲 

Each person had a map and had to find four pages from different science books placed along the trail (one of the books was Darwin's On the Origin of Species). 📜 It's so intense that even the items you have to hunt for are pages from science books! 🤓

 

 

Actually, scientists have been trying to work together like this for a while. In the era when everyone was focused on oncogenes, there was a specific conference just for oncogene researchers starting in 1985. The posters were hilarious every single year! 🤣 This is just a sample of some of the posters.

A big thanks to Prof. Joan Brugge for sharing this story at the "Cancer genetics: History and consequences" meeting. If you want to read more, check out "A not so brief history of the Oncogene Meeting and its Cartoons" from the journal Oncogene in 2007. 

 

The funniest part is that there's a supplemental figure where they drew a bunch of key people in the oncogene field, but some weren't named. J. Simon wrote in the figure legend that he couldn't remember who everyone was and that when he asked T. Hunter, he couldn't remember either LOL. 🤦‍♂️ How can a figure legend be so funny?! 😂

Eventually, that meeting stopped and was replaced by the AACR, which brings together a huge number of cancer researchers every year. 🩺 

Good ideas often pop up when we mix things together. 🧪 Sometimes we get brilliant ideas and concepts from physicists, like Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman. 🌌 Getting all stiff and formal when talking about research just makes your mind go blank. 🥶

I really want to go to Woodstock.Bio2 + Night Science! 🏕️ #TheConferenceToEndAllConferences 💯

The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings in 2026 will also be multidisciplinary, so that's another one I'd love to go to. ✈️

P.S. This post was written with a lot of hyper energy, hehe. 🤪 

You can read the full story and see the photos in the comments. 👇
🚫 Thai language: NO CANCER FB page/Blogger
🧬 English language: The Whispers of Biology (LinkedIn/Blogger) 

#AcademicConference, #ScienceCommunication, #InterdisciplinaryResearch, #ResearchInnovation, #CreativeScience, #ScienceCollaboration, #NightScience, and #AcademicLife.