Afternoons were spent in less formal but more intense interactions in smaller groups. In the first session, each participant was offered the opportunity to describe what she or he considered to be the greatest advance of the last 30 years, measured as impact on thinking and further research practice. Monday evening, four parallel working groups, chosen to be very heterogeneous internally but relatively similar among each other in having broad subdisciplinary composition, met to identify areas of greatest advance. They reported in plenary Tuesday morning. The report of Research Progress concentrates on those areas of advance highlighted by all four groups.
Every history of science reflects uneven paces and unexpected directions of advance.
For many topics that arose, it was clear that much more progress was imminent, and their consideration was moved to the next working groups and sections of the document. During this entire process it was clear that most participants acted independently of their own, specific research interests, giving confidence that our identification of major advances is accurate. There was such strong agreement that significant leaps had been made in understanding of planktonic microbial food webs over the last 30 years that we set them first in our report. There is no priority in ordering of other topics, which we arranged for compactness and to avoid jarring transitions in the writing. For the second part of the week and for writing the report, we took greater advantage of the individual participant's specialties and created four more internally homogeneous groups.