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BOSTON -- -- it's the new kid on the meetings block.
But it's not going to be a small affair. Organizers are expecting more than 10,000 people to crowd into the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and three smaller venues, making it the largest gathering of microbiologists in the world, according to , of Massachusetts General Hospital and chair of the meetings board for the .
It's also, he told ľֱ, the only meeting that includes the full scope of microbiology. "Under one tent, we can really cover the full spectrum, from very basic microbiological science to translational work to clinical applications," Hooper said.
ASM Microbe combines two of the society's premier meetings -- the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC), which used to be held in the fall, and the ASM General Meeting, usually scheduled earlier in the year.
Although attendees were members of the same society, the two meetings had "differing constituencies" Hooper said, and "there was really no meeting where everyone came together under the same umbrella at the same time."
ASM Microbe meets that goal, he said, with more than 10,000 delegates already registered for the meeting, which kicks off Thursday with a full day of scientific workshops that ends with a keynote session featuring Microsoft founder and infectious-disease philanthropist Bill Gates.
That session, Hooper said, is a bit of a coup for the meeting: "He's a very busy man."
The meeting's scientific program gets into full swing the following day, with sessions organized into seven tracks:
- Applied and environmental science
- Clinical science and epidemiology
- Ecological and evolutionary science
- Host-microbe biology
- Molecular biology and physiology
- Therapeutics and prevention
- The profession of microbiology
The last one is new this year, Hooper said, and covers career development and other "aspects of microbiology that people deal with on a day-to-day basis."
The seven tracks essentially cover the waterfront. "One of the themes that has been a general theme of the society is that microbes touch everything we do -- the environment, obviously human health -- and they are so intertwined with existence on the planet at all levels," Hooper said.
"The combined meeting will also offer greatly expanded opportunities for networking," Hooper said.
Networking, he said, "is the reason people come to a physical meeting rather than catching up with things online." The program will include both formal and informal opportunities for attendees to network, including special "peer-to-peer" discussion sessions, he added.
Mornings at the meeting will include large plenary sessions, ranging from topics in cell division to the "double-edged sword" of antimicrobial therapy. The afternoons will be devoted to smaller symposia and slide sessions.
The ICAAC meeting usually left space for discussion of breaking news, such as the West African Ebola outbreak. This year, Hooper said, investigators will discuss aspects of the Zika virus epidemic affecting the Caribbean and South and Central America.