Well five actually, but everything in due course.
Actually I’m just going to hit the major high lights:
The computer support they’ve got is amazing. On our tour of one of the facilities we walked into a room built for pure computational biologists. There where giant metal sleeves of cables running up from the center of every table surface, and looking up I saw giant bundles of ethernet cables running overhead. The only word that comes to mind is awesome.
Plenty of growth chambers and greenhouses of course.
I learned a lot about soybeans. Which was good. I got something to call my interest: crop genomics.
At the poster session they had this evening I met a guy who was working with wild rice, which is only in the earliest stages of domestication. The two things that struck me where the creativity he was forced into, given the extremely limited resources the government provides for such a small crop, and the fact that a big percentage of the money he gets comes from the wild rice growers themselves, and in return he goes out and meets with the grower association. He’s only of literally four people doing work in wild rice and the only molecular biologist. So it was really cool to talk to him.
Coolest Title I’ve ever heard of: Lichenologist (The Lichens that grown on rocks and trees, not the werewolves in Underworld)
Saddest realization: Not only is it a lot more work to cross soybeans than corn, but after you’ve made that cross, you get MAYBE 5 seeds. Not the 50-200 you’d normally get from an ear of corn. It seems to me that would change the way you’d have to do experiments in all sorts of ways, though I’m not having a lot of success thinking of what they are yet.