AAAS meeting, with Bill Gates and other luminaries, gets underway

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its annual meeting in Seattle right now, and the event — billed as the world’s largest general scientific gathering — has a lot of big names on the program. Later today, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates will be giving one of the plenary talks. He and his wife set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation almost two decades ago to offer financial support for a host of causes, including global health. Other notable plenary speakers include journalist Maryn McKenna, who has written extensively about antibiotic resistance, and social scientist Alondra Nelson, whose work has delved into the bioethical — especially racial — implications of genetics. 

And STAT’s own Sharon Begley will be at the meeting to receive this year’s AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award in the online category. She’s being recognized for a trio of stories on the fraught field of drug development and research on Alzheimer’s.