ASMS 2013: A review

For the past week I have been at the American Society of Mass Spectrometry Annual Conference in Minneapolis. It was held at the Minneapolis Convention Center, which is a very nice location. Minneapolis is actually kind of impressive.

It's not very big though, which I found surprising considering the population.
The conference itself was pretty good. I learned a lot from my weekend short course, entitled 'Mass Analyzers: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know But Didn't Know Who to Ask'.

However, I found the Oral Sessions somewhat frustrating/boring. Most of the presenters at this conference seemed to see mass spectrometers as an end in themselves. Many of the talks followed this format:

1. We got some samples from somewhere. It doesn't really matter where.
2. We analyzed them using a clever mass spec technique or new instrumentation.
3. We got awesome separation and identified lots of metabolites/proteins. We don't care what their functions are.

I only care about mass spectrometry inasmuch as it can answer interesting biological questions. Instrumentation is interesting to a point, but it's just a tool to me.

Nevertheless I learned a lot. And there were quite a few talks that actually applied mass spectrometry to some interesting questions. And many of the posters were actually interesting.

But one of the great things about this conference was all the free stuff. Each evening the mass spectrometry corporations put on 'hospitality suites', which are kind of hard to explain. They were held in the Hilton Hotel and the best way to describe it I think is 'night clubs, with free alcohol and food and mass spectrometers as part of the decor'.

Here are some guys making blueberry martinis through an ice-sculpture.

And Waters Corporation had a game show.

Freebies abounded at all of these events.

All of these corporations also put on free breakfast seminars to tell you about their new technology and why it was the best. And to make you have positive mental associations with their company.

This is what I ended up with.

So now I have a lot of free corporate-branded stuff and a head exploding with mass spectrometry. Awesome.