An Unforgettable Journey Down Under: Labbot's Australian Tour 2024
Two weeks, four universities, five hotels, seven airport security checks and countless interactions with scientist from all over the world. Our recent trip to Australia was nothing if not intense, but also a ton of fun!
A Serendipitous Start: The Irish Connection
In a sense, we came to Australia by way of Ireland. At the FASEB Protein Aggregation Conference in Malahide last summer, we held a competition with a Labbot as the grand prize.
The winner was Professor Danny Hatters from Melbourne University, and his fortune turned out to be very lucky for us as well. Since we decided to deliver the winning Labbot in person, we figured that we should take the opportunity to schedule a few visits to other labs while we were in the “neighbourhood”. Much thanks to Dannys support, it grew into a very ambitious itinerary, including a sponsorship of the Lorne Protein Meeting.
A Meeting of Minds: Lorne Proteins 2024
We were initially hesitant to add an entire conference to the travel plans, but it turned out to be a great choice. The conference was nothing short of fantastic, with a beautiful venue, a lively exhibition hall and a broad range of protein scientists from around the world.
The Labbot Demo Tour: From Melbourne to Brisbane and Beyond
Immediately after the conference we started our demo tour, covering a distance equivalent to the length of Sweden as we went from Melbourne to Brisbane, Sydney, Wollongong and then back to Melbourne to deliver the Labbot.
Thankfully, we were able to fit one weekend of tourism and relaxation in the middle of the trip, finding time for hiking, diving, surfing and some much needed rest.
Reflections from the Road
Our journey offered numerous insights and memorable observations. Among them:
- The famed Australian hospitality is as warm and genuine as the stereotypes suggest.
- “Room temperature” means something very different depending on where you are in the world.
- You can get surprisingly good pictures by putting a cell phone camera to the eyepiece of a microscope.
- University buildings come in all shapes and sizes, but the insides are comfortably familiar. If we ever visit a lab that doesn’t have rows of blue-capped bottles with assorted buffers in, we will know we're in the wrong place.
And, perhaps most surprisingly, we found that the tales of Australia's spiders were greatly exaggerated—at least based on our experiences.
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