Two Hundred Neuroscientists, Six to a Boarding-School Dormitory

In the summer of 1971 a large international neuroscience symposium had a date, nearly two hundred participants, a Nobel laureate among them, and then, a few weeks before opening, no venue. The Austrian resort that was to host it had gone bankrupt.

Every hotel in the Alps gave the same answer: August.

Then a young researcher on the organising side remembered that he had spent his teenage years at Schloss Neubeuern, a castle on a hill above the Inn valley that had been a boarding school since the 1920s. And in August, a boarding school is empty.

The castle had beds. It had a lot of beds per room.

The school agreed to reopen in its one empty month, and the founders of a whole scientific field came up the hill and were shown to dormitories: rooms with four beds, rooms with six, one bathroom down the corridor.

Reputations of that size do not come with private bathrooms.

The young researcher, by his own account, spent the week in the quiet terror of a host. He had suggested this. If anybody found the mattress hard, it was his mattress. But the great names did not complain. By the second evening the old dining room was a lecture hall, and after dinner the corridors were full of distinguished scientists in slippers, talking about the brain on their way to clean their teeth.

He said afterwards that this was the real gift. At a hotel he would have seen the great figures from the back of a hall. At the castle he queued with them for the shower, and sat with them on the pupils’ benches, and was asked what he was working on.

I have hosted, and I know the terror. When my husband’s colleagues came to Copenhagen for a conference, the hotel double-booked, and I offered our flat to four economists. I put two in the children’s room, under the glow-in-the-dark stars, and two on the sofa bed, which had last been used by my mother and had opinions about it.

Nobody complained. At breakfast a professor of monetary policy came out of the children’s room and asked, very seriously, why there was a dinosaur under his pillow. The youngest, who was eating cereal, said it was a security dinosaur, and that he had been very lucky to get it.

He took it home. I still have the email. It says the dinosaur was the best thing about the conference.

The castle at Neubeuern got its dormitories back in September. The boys returned and never knew who had slept in their beds. Our dinosaur is in Chicago.