In the preface to his noveL "SmaU WorLd" David Lodge writes: "When ApriL with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that Liquid by whose power the fLowers are engendered; when this zephyr, too, with its duLcet breath, had breathed Life into the tender new shoots ...then as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, foLk Long to go on piLgrimages. OnLy these days professionaL peopLe caU them conferences. " At the end of . June 1985 about 50 scientists drawn from a dozen different countries gathered in Aberdeen for a week to...