Dear all, The biannual Gordon Research Conference in Structural Biology, accompanied by the first Gordon Research Seminar, will take place in the last week of July at Bates College, New England, a few hours drive from the IUCr meeting that follows in the first week of August. The theme for the GRC is "Faster, Smaller, Better: Novel Technologies for Diffraction Experiments in Molecular Biology and Drug Discovery" and of the GRS (which precedes the GRC and is targeting young scientists giving them an opportunity to present their own work to their peers prior to the meeting) "Towards Integrative Structural Biology". We have a truly fantastic line of speakers and discussion leaders, including John Kuriyan , Randy Read, Ana Gonzales, Ilme Schlichting , Henry Chapman , John Spence, Graeme Winter , Aina Cohen, Thomas Schneider , Gwyndaf Evans , Bob Fischetti , Flora Meilleur, Janet Newman , John Hunt , Michael Duszenko , Jose Antonio Marquez, Paul Adams , Clemens Vonrhein , Airlie McCoy , Brent Nannenga, Zbyszek Dauter , Tom Terwilliger , Garib Murshudov , Gerard Kleywegt , Paul Emsley, Dmitri Svergun , Peter Zwart , Michael Hammel , Lois Pollack, Elspeth Garman, Lisa Keefe , Gary Gililland , Aydnan Achour and Giovanna Scapin. For more details visit our web site: https://www.grc.org/programs.aspx?year=2014&program=diffrac And here is the largely unavoidable motivational speech for anyone interested to my highly biased personal view: I first went to this meeting in 1998, as a young post-doc, presenting results that later led to the 'ARP/wARP' software: in fact, I had changed my slides (for the younger audience: slides were pieces of photographic film that were typically projected as mirror images of what you really wanted) a month or so before the meeting, as we got our very first models auto-built. I thought it was the most educational and exciting meeting I have ever been to, and in many ways it has shaped my research plan and my career (and my hate for golf). I wish I could also say that I never missed any of the subsequent meetings, but courtesy of the US Visa authorities and the Greek Army, I actually did a miss a couple. However, I still find them as exciting as so many years ago, but for a whole different set of scientific reasons: the diffraction methods landscape is changing rapidly, new machines and concepts make possible experiments that we do not even know what they are going to be! I am honored to be chairing this year's edition, and I hope that I will hear from at least one of you, what I had heard from a few before: "this is the best meeting I have been in my life". Science aside, I am glad there is no golf course nearby the Bates College site where we are holding this meeting for the last decade, I am equally happy for the "Great Outdoors" site where we do the mid-week excursion, and I am looking forwards to the football (sorry: "soccer") and basketball games. The Bates College boasts an excellent auditorium for the talks, a truly outstanding lounge for the poster sessions (that are always accompanied by drinks, an observation that might partially explain the tendency to finish well after midnight in a very positive spirit) and a somewhat confusingly and an unexpectedly good quality restaurant in the very friendly College site. A limited amount of (partial) bursaries to young scientists will be available for this year - when this becomes definitive we will post the news. I should also mention that one session will host eight seminars that will be selected from the poster sessions, giving all particpants the opportunity to present their own research! In the meantime, I am looking forward to welcome you all at the meeting and I hope you will register ... today! Best regards, Tassos Anastassis (Tassos, Perrakis, Principal Investigator , Staff Member Department of Biochemistry (B8, Netherlands Cancer Institute, Dept. B8, 1066 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel: +31 20 512 1951 Fax: +31 20 512 1954 Mobile , SMS: +31 6 28 597791