On a drizzling, asphalt gray Monday morning, I made my way down to København H to get on a charter bus set for our first stop. I was bleary-eyed and tired, but the free coffee waiting for us at Biopeople helped. There, we heard about how initiatives like IN2LIFESCI and the European Patients’ Academy on Therapeutic Innovation are connecting doctors, researchers, and patients to help build relations between these normally disparate parties and improve treatment.
From there, we set out for Odense, the 3rd largest city in Denmark. The drive there involved crossing the formerly longest suspension bridge in the world which felt all the more harrowing with the strong gusts pushing our boxy bus to and fro.
Once we arrived, we went to Souther Denmark University to meet with a rep from Brage Storstein Anderson’s research group. They work primarily with spliceosomes and how alternative splicing in the human genome can cause serious metabolic diseases. Afterwards, we got to look around some of the labs which included a glimpse at a HiSeq machine that can analyze a whole genome in just a few days (!).
After a day of lectures, we went to our hostel which was surprisingly nice. I shared a room with five other guys from my class. We each had a bunk bed and had a private bathroom. We even got free breakfast in the morning. Yeah, hostels aren’t too bad.
Tuesday began with Stephen Fey of mc2 Biotek who probably gave the best, most passionate lecture of the week. He is currently working on selling a machine that he developed that is used to suspend cell cultures in three dimensions rather than the measly two dimensions offered by the standard petri dishes. His machine does this by slowly spinning the samples, creating turbulence that simulates bloodflow, and it has proven to be a much more accurate depiction of how real cells in human tissue react to drugs in real 3D environments.
Then, we had to drive up to Aarhus, the 2nd largest city in Denmark. Shortly after arriving, we attended the university’s (I forget which one) Dandrite conference where several researchers presented some of the work that they and their labs were currently working on. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t a huge fan of this one. I’m not really into neurology or psychology, the overbearing subjects of this three hour long session. Some of the talks felt like TEDx talks and barely skimmed the surface of their topics while others were a tsunami of dense concepts that only ostracized my feeble mind. Eh, at least they gave us free beers at the end.
We started our evening by going to our hotel right in the middle of the old district. I gotta say, our room makes walk-in closets feel luxurious. I could touch both walls with my elbows if I was doing the chicken dance. We had a bunk bed that folded out from the wall, a desk that had no place being in a room this small, and a bathroom that immediately called to mind the cramped, plastic interior of an airplane restroom. Luckily, we only needed to sleep there for one night.
We had the chance to amble around the city on an uneventful Tuesday night. I went with some of the guys to get Thai food which was delicious, especially after our unsatisfying lunches. The canals were kind of lovely in the lonely darkness of the shopping districts. One guy in our group said that he had herd of a bar that was supposed to be bumping on this dead weeknight, so we walked in circles looking for it while drinking wine that we got at a 7-11. For about 45 minutes we just walked and talked and acted like dumb (and loud) college students. IT wasn’t so bad until we got to the bar and it was completely empty, save for the bartenders. This being a letdown, we just stopped at the Sherlock Holmes Bar where the middle-aged but still rockin’ Brit lad came over and talked to us Americans. All in all, not bad.
Thankfully, Wednesday had no lectures in store for us. However, it had something much better. We went to the Aarhus Art Museum (ARoS) which had multiple floors of interesting contemporary art. I absolutely loved this place and the genuinely thought-provoking exhibits they had. The basement level was pieces as part of a series on the 9 circles of Hell with one piece standing out to me in particular: a pitch black room with an eerily hazy red light emitting from behind a corner. I expected a shadow to creep into its light at any moment. If you’ve played the horror game PT like I ave, then this one will get to you.
Also, this room full of mirrors with fake rafters did a fantastic job at constantly making me think that I was high above some etherial theatre stage.
Most of the museum was dedicated to an exhibit focused on contemporary Chinese artists. It definitely made me consider the cultural clash that China is experiencing right now. Their culture for thousands of years has focused on preserving the past and not taking anything for granted, and in today’s world of looking forward and consuming, sometimes dissonance is created. Some of the notable pieces to me included a surreal animation featuring a cartoon character traversing a hostile, dark version of a child’s nightmare that represented the reality of today’s violent, empty world and a tiger rug made out of cigarettes, an oxymoronic medium as the tiger is considered to be a symbol of health.
To top it all off, the top of the museum is crowned with a panoramic ring covered in a spectrum of colored glass that gives a unique vantage point of the whole cityscape. I manages to get some video of the view and a few pics.
Thursday was back in Copenhagen where we visited the headquarters of Novo Nordisk, one of the biggest companies in Denmark and the biggest name in insulin production and diabetes research. The sleek facilities looked straight out of a sci-fi movie. We heard from the VP of Research who talked about the business aspects of their work and some current endeavors to push out an improved insulin drug to replace an older model.
The rest of the day was spent hearing from Gert Mølgaard, a former researcher who now works as a consultant for many biotech companies. This guy knows how to keep people interested as he answered the big questions like “Why do drugs stay so damn expensive in the States when they’re much cheaper elsewhere?” Talking about the Patent Cliff as many older drugs lose their patents and the rise of injectable protein products kept me interested, so props to him. Friday was just class lectures, nothing much.
I didn’t know what to expect going into this week. It could have easily been a horrible, Death Valley-esque dry week with no social interactions at all. Instead, I had a pretty cool experience with some cool people in my class, and I got to see how current researchers work right now in this quickly shifting field. All in all, not bad. Not bad at all.
