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| Reports on Overseas' Conferences and Meetings |
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| Report on International Congress of Radiation Research 2008 |
| Keiji Suzuki, Department of Molecular Medicine |
International Congress of Radiation Research (ICRB)2008 has been held between November 11 and 13, 2008 in Jaipur, a capital of Rajasthan state, India. This conference was aimed to communicate between basic and applied radiation biologists in India. Also, scientists from foreign countries, like USA, UK, Japan, etc were invited to facilitate the discussion the scientists in India and from outside of the country. Because of the Indian political issue, the nuclear terrorism is apparently a national concern. Therefore, most talks were oriented tranlational research in order to use the knowledge obtained from the basic research for developing novel radioprotectors. More than 500 people were gathered in the newly established international conference hall of University of Rajasthan, and various issues in the field of radiation biology were extensively discussed.
I was asked to deliver a lecture on DNA damage checkpoint activation at DNA double-strand breaks. Because the technology may be useful to estimate radiation doses, several questions were raised by the audience. Our session was organized by Dr. Hande from National University of Singapore, and there were many interesting talks including the studies using G1-PCC-FISH, telomere-FISH, COBRA-FISH techniques. Thus, our session could be one of the most exciting one during the conference.
Rajasthan state is located in the northwest part of India. The state capital, Jaipur, is the famous for its name, a pink city. In fact, many buildings in the city were made of yellow red stone. It was also a base of well-known Hindu tribe, a Rajput, and the city atmosphere is totally different from the other cities in India. Jaipur is also located very close to the Thar desert, and therefore the wind is dry and sandy. There are a couple of famous architectures including Hawa Mahal and Jantar Mantar, which are the famous city palace and astronomical architecture. Camels and vivid colors of domestic clothing brought me back to the ancient times, when the great maharaja was living.
As there is a high natural background area in Kerara state, we have accepted scientists from the institute in that area. This time, it is quite impressive to see that many of the young radiation biologists were attended to the conference. Although most of them did works to search for novel radioprotective materials, this trend could be a way that radiation biologists in Japan have to think of. In this sense, to attend ICRB2008 is very useful experience, and I greatly appreciated the support by Nagasaki GCOE program. |
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