Stockholm

Café society: the EuroScience Open Forum won participants over with its relaxed atmosphere. Credit: A. ABBOTT

Sceptics said it couldn't work. The very time and place of the first EuroScience meeting bringing together scientists, journalists and the public to celebrate science — à la the annual AAAS meeting in the United States — spoke against it.

It is difficult enough to get European researchers, who will happily attend US meetings, to come together on home turf. And on a continent where August holidays are sacred, who would instead visit one of Europe's most expensive cities for an untested meeting?

But 1,800 people came to the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, from 25–28 August, exceeding the 1,500 expected. And they soon found their irritation at some teething problems waning in the feel-good atmosphere that ESOF generated — aided by its location at the heart of the historic city. “Being in the city is fundamental for this type of conference,” says Clive Cookson, science editor of the London-based Financial Times.

ESOF 2004 was organized by EuroScience, founded in 1997 to promote science and its public discussion. The meeting's sponsors, including Nature, rather than its participants, met most costs. Sponsors expressed satisfaction, and the two German groups who contributed most, the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Stifterverband, a donors' association for the sciences and humanities, are supporting the next meeting, planned for Munich in July 2006.

A third of participants came from Sweden and more than 50 flew in from the United States, with 68 countries represented in all. There were 350 journalists.

Alan Leshner, chief executive of the AAAS, formerly the American Association for the Advancement of Science, took the opportunity to announce that the body will in future use only its acronym, to emphasize its global reach.

Though many attendees complained of too many sessions on media and policy and too few on science, some of the scientific sessions were novel and successful. Rainer Goebel from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, for example, made his audience gasp when he described his studies of people controlling a computer game with their thoughts via brain-imaging machines.

Another success was the Science in the City programme, which brought theatre, films, exhibitions and other events to venues across Stockholm. The Amazing Profmobile, a rickshaw, took scientists to address surprised shoppers and pedestrians. Rolf Tarrach, a physicist from the University of Barcelona, rushed gleefully between theatre and scientific sessions. The programme was a “fantastic European experience which resonates with this historic city”, he says.

There were a few teething troubles. Journalists complained that talks lacked written summaries. Some of the presentations were too technical for their audience. And few students and younger researchers were present.

There will be better support next time for journalists, and more training of speakers, says ESOF 2004 organizer Carl Sundberg, a physiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who is also on the steering committee for ESOF 2006. “And we'll look more imaginatively at participation fees, to ensure there is no barrier to students,” he says.