TL/DR – Gullible career lab tech’ in protected government job is angry because he got taken for the fool he probably is.
What the hell is an NCI scientist doing, wasting their only meeting per year on what is widely known to be a scam? Was this guy living under a rock? Did he not do any homework about this organization? For most scientists out in the “real world”, we go to meetings run by established societies in our area of expertise. Those, and a couple of other well known conference organizing bodies (Gordon, Keystone).
This type of negative publicity is useful, to highlight these shady business practices to the <1% of academia that isn't aware of them already. But C'mon! In my opinion he got exactly what he deserved for being so gosh-darned gullible in the first place. He got his ego massaged by the invitation, and thought "this looks sweet". It's like that time the Department Chair got a computer virus, or gave the Dept. bank account details to a guy from Nigeria who seemed legit. Maybe that's why this guy is a "senior research associate" and has a grand total of 20 publications after 30 years in the biz. He'll probably also find there's all sorts of small print in the attendance contract, in which attendees agree to have their name and likeness associated with the meeting, so he's up the creek without a paddle on that front too. Wonder if this guy has an AOL email account too?
