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Britain’s staging of one of the world’s leading science conferences
has ended in financial disaster. Directors of the company set up to manage
the 17th International Congress of Genetics, which took place in August,
have called in the liquidator. The company ran up debts of around £200
000 and has assets of about £30 000.

The congress, which brings together researchers from all branches of
genetics, is held every five years under the auspices of the International
Genetics Federation (IGF). Birmingham was chosen to host the 1993 meeting
at the previous congress in Toronto.

The organisers recruited speakers from more than 25 countries, many
of whom must now queue up with other creditors to see if their air fares
and hotel bills will be paid. In all, the company owes about £60
000 in unpaid expenses. Costs for some speakers travelling from poorer
countries were prepaid, says Paul Nurse, chairman of Britain’s Genetical
Society and a member of the executive committee of the congress. Nevertheless,
for some who travelled from Japan, the US and Australia, the loss of money
is more than a mere inconvenience. Some of the speakers are ‘extremely angry’,
says Nurse.

Besides scientists, the creditors include the City of Birmingham, which
lent the congress £100 000, the International Convention Centre (ICC),
where the meeting was held, and a host of small businesses which provided
services at the congress. The first meeting of creditors took place last
week.

The company’s two directors, both of whom served on the executive committee,
were Derek Smith, professor of genetics at the University of Birmingham,
and Ralph Riley, former deputy chairman of the Agricultural and Food Research
Council. Smith says a campaign is still running to find the money to pay
creditors.

Many of the people involved in organising the congress learnt about
its dire financial straits only in October, after Smith sent out a letter
asking for help in raising cash to cover outstanding debts. ‘We have financial
problems greater than the worst scenario that had been anticipated,’ he
wrote. These problems stem from the failure to attract enough people. To
break even, the congress needed 2200 fee-paying delegates, but the final
tally came to around half that figure.

During the planning stages, the executive and finance committees budgeted
for 4000 delegates. This figure came from comparisons with the Toronto conference
which, after a late surge of on-the-spot registrations, attracted 3701 people.

But in Birmingham there was no late surge. ‘It was a re-run of Toronto
but done in a recession, at a time when science funding was being squeezed
far greater than it had been,’ says Nurse. ‘And it was held in Europe.
People were just not prepared to travel.’ The congress was ‘a victim of
circumstance’, agrees Smith.

Others put the blame elsewhere. ‘The congress was not run competently,’
says one creditor. Some point to apparent examples of mismanagement, such
as the hiring of the immense National Indoor Arena, near the ICC, for the
whole week of the congress – an arrangement that cost tens of thousands
of pounds. In the event, it was used only once. Smith argues that such contracts
were fixed in 1988, when Birmingham’s bid was put to the IGF, and before
the executive committee was appointed.

From an academic standpoint, the Birmingham congress was ‘an unqualified
success’, says Peter Day, director of the Center for Agricultural Molecular
Biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a past secretary of the
IGF. Nevertheless, he questions whether such wide-ranging conferences have
a future. Genetics has blossomed in recent years to cover many areas of
biology, he says. As a result, people tend to go to smaller, specialised
meetings.

‘There are rather few generalist geneticists who want to get a wide
view of fields adjacent to their own,’ says Day. ‘These are implications
the federation will have to consider for future conferences.’ The 1998 congress
will be held in Peking. As secretary-general of the Birmingham conference,
Smith has been invited to act as adviser to the Chinese organisers.