More than a thousand life scientists descended on the Saxon city of Dresden in September for the 2005 installment of the European Life Scientist Organization’s annual meeting. The event provides a crucial opportunity for Europe’s life scientists to meet, get an update on the latest research in their fields and forge important ties to others in the research community.

Highlights of this year’s meeting included talks by several present and former EMBL scientists. EMBL Group Leader Elena Conti was awarded the ELSO Early Career Award.

Hans Schöler, Group Leader in EMBL’s Gene Expression Programme from 1991 to 1999, gave a special EMBL Alumni Association lecture in which he traced the path of his career after EMBL. That took him via the Center for Animal Transgenesis and Germ Cell Research in Philadelphia to the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, where he is now Director of the Department Cell and Developmental Biology.

The next ELSO conference will take place in Dresden in 2007.