ELITE HIV RESEARCHERS ﾻ On November 17, the Institute of Human Virology, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, will hold its 2006 International HIV/AIDS meeting in Baltimore. No doubt, elite controllers of HIV - the subject of a feature on page 26 - will come up at least a few times at the conference, which features many of the top researchers in AIDS. For more, see www.ihv.org/meeting/index.html.

BIOMARKERS IN VIENNA ﾻ If Emanuel Petricoin and Lance Liotta's take on how the peptidome can move biomarker research to the bedside on page 32 sparks your interest, head to Vienna for the Cambridge Healthtech Institute's Biomarkers Europe meeting November 9-10. For more, visit www.biomarkerseries.com/europe.

A GOOD GIG ﾻ Got a gigabyte of sequence data that would help your work, but not the resources to do it? Roche is giving out a grant for "enough reagents and supporting sequencing services to generate over one gigabase of data." They'll then do the sequencing runs and give you the data back, along with the rights to it. Deadline is December 8. For more, see http://tinyurl.com/y5qqas.

RISKY BUSINESS ﾻ It's time for biotechs to take risk more seriously, writes Bruce Belzak on page 40. One way to do that is to attend the "Risk Management in Drug Safety - The Human Factor Approach" meeting in Copenhagen on November 21. Organizers promise "different and perhaps new views on risk management." For more, see http://tinyurl.com/yb2gfj.