How we won the Congress

Phil Batterham is a skilled and meticulous organiser, with an understanding of the value of theatre. When the University of Melbourne geneticist flew to Beijing in 1998 for the 18th International Congress of Genetics, he had already spent two years organising Australia's bid to bring the world's biggest genetics festival to Melbourne in 2003.

In Manchester five years earlier, Beijing had gained a measure of revenge for losing the 2000 Olympics to Sydney, by pipping the harbour city to stage ICoG 1998.

Batterham, who became secretary of the Genetics Society of Australia (GSA) in 1996, had observed the informal nature of the selection process during his first ICoG conference in Canada in 1988, and with help from the Melbourne Convention and Marketing Bureau, had prepared a knock 'em dead presentation.

Melbourne's rival

The German city of Hamburg was Melbourne's only rival for the bid. At previous congresses, there had been no active lobbying of the delegates who would choose the next IcoG venue. "Few people even knew who the delegates were," Batterham says.

He had prepared information packages for each delegate. "We'd gone to all the hotels, talked to the airlines, investigated every sector of the conference industry. We'd even brought a professional conference organiser on board. Whatever we promised, we intended to deliver.

Batterham set up the GSA's booth in the Congress' corporate display hall. "We asked people to sign up with us if they were delegates, and we asked everyone else, if they knew a delegate, to send them to see us.

"We organised a reception for delegates at the Great Wall Sheraton, the night before the vote, and we chartered a bus to take them across town."

After dinner Batterham brought out his piece de resistance to make the presentation: internationally respected mammal geneticist Prof Jennifer Marshall-Graves.

"Jenny was outstanding -- she's a superb speaker, with real substance, but sharp, cheeky and full of good humour," says Batterham. "It went down extremely well, and I wouldn't have wanted to follow her."

Melbourne won the right to host ICoG 2003 by an overwhelming majority, and Batterham estimates he has now racked up around 14,000 hours organising the congress, in addition to his normal teaching and research load at Melbourne University.

Why did he take on such a huge task? Batterham says it was his passion for genetics, and his belief that bringing the congress to Australia could profoundly influence the careers of a new generation of young Australian geneticists.

As an undergraduate at La Trobe University, doing a botany-genetics double major, Batterham says he was thrilled by the number of unanswered questions in genetics. "It seemed to be a vibrant discipline, with an amazing future.

"We were seeing the foundations of molecular biology laid, while the foundations of classical genetics were being shaken. I found that very exciting."

Batterham did a PhD at Monash University, investigating how natural selection maintains genetic variation in Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly populations and how much variation is selectively neutral and may be lost through genetic drift.

With a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the process of aging in fruit flies, Batterham went on to do a postdoctoral project at Syracuse University in New York.

He worked on the alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) gene, and showed that a Drosophila species that lives on cactus fruits lived longer in an ethanol-enriched atmosphere -- an early clue to the role of nutrition in aging.

He returned to Melbourne in 1982, after winning a Melbourne University fellowship, and worked with Dr Jim Camakaris, of the Department of Genetics on metallothionene gene function. He accepted a lectureship in the department, and then began to investigate the genetics of insecticide resistance in Drosophila.

This work was the genesis of a seminal paper published in Science last year by Batterham's group, and its collaborators in the UK, France and the US, describing a D. melanogaster gene called Cyp6g1, which confers resistance not just to DDT, but to a disparate array of modern, synthetic pesticides.

These include organochlorines, organophosphates, carbamates, neonicotinoids -- even hormone-like growth regulators. The gene has spread through laboratory Drosophila populations around the world, in the absence of selective pressure from DDT or other herbicides.

Batterham's trip to Canada to attend ICoG 1988 was the event that sowed the seed for this year's ICoG 2003 congress in Melbourne, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's elucidation of the structure of DNA.

"As a student, before I had the opportunity to travel overseas, I thought, 'Wouldn't it be neat if we could bring some of the great experts in genetics so we could meet them?'," he says.

"I heard that the Genetics Society of Australia was thinking of bidding, but most people said it would just be too much work.

"Then Chris Gillies did have a go when he was secretary -- he presented a bid in Manchester for it to be held in Sydney in 1998, and it lost to Beijing by just one vote."

Batterham already was experienced in organising big public events. In 1976 he founded the Catchment Players of Darebin, one of Victoria's most successful musical theatre groups, and has organised major street festivals involving up to 20,000 people.

He also spent years lobbying for the construction of Darebin's Arts and Entertainment Centre, and still directs the city's annual Carols by Candlelight concert.,

One of the first letters Batterham opened after being elected secretary of the Genetics Society of Australia in 1996 was from the Sydney Convention Visitors Bureau, asking if the GSA would bid again for the International Congress of Genetics. (Ultimately, the Melbourne Convention and Marketing Bureau put up a slightly better case for the congress to be staged in Melbourne).

"After all those years thinking about why the GSA didn't get in and do something, I thought, 'Why not me?," says Batterham.

"I thought it would be important to young scientists. I'd been involved in writing a history of Australian genetics in 1993, and I'd asked about 60 young scientists around the country about things that had influenced their decision to go into genetics.

"Many of them mentioned they had attended scientific meetings organised by [CSIRO Plant Industry Chief] Jim Peacock, who had brought in a lot of internationally renowned scientists, and that resonated with my own experience.

"I wouldn't have put six and a half years of my life into it if I didn't think it would make an impact on Australia and overseas. It creates a unique opportunity for young Australian scientists and students to interact with the world's best, and for the world's best to see Australian science close up."

Australian Biotechnology News is a major sponsor of the 19th International Congress of Genetics 2003. For more information, visit www.geneticscongress2003.com