Gairdner Symposium

Somehow, this year's Gairdner symposium completely managed to escape my notice until today, when a co-worker forwarded it along to me. For those of you who don't know the Gairdner awards, I believe it's roughly the Canadian equivalent to the Swedish Nobel prize, although only for medicine and medical sciences. Since I wasn't aware of it until just a few years ago, I don't think it's has quite the same level of recognition, but the more I look into it, the more I discover that it carries just about as much weight: 78 of the 298 award winners have gone on to win Nobel prizes.

At any rate, this year is the 50th anniversary of the foundation (although there's only been 48 years of prizes, apparently), so they're putting on one heck of a show. The Vancouver symposium will be a three part event at the Chan auditorium at UBC, in which 4 Nobel Laureates will take part in discussions ranging from Personal Medicine to the future of the field of health care.

Anyhow, if you're in Vancouver on March 11th, I highly recommend you get yourself a set of tickets. They're available for free from Ticketmaster. (Yes, they will charge you for free tickets that you still have to print yourself. Ticketmaster blows chickens.) Here are the links:

Session 1: Gairdner Symposium - The Future of Medicine (morning session)
Session 2: Gairdner Symposium - The Future of Medicine (afternoon session)
Session 3: 2009 Michael Smith Forum - Personal Medicine (evening session)

I'm already excited about it!