How not to start a talk... or maybe: how to grab everyone's attention right from the beginning, but annoy your main funder while you're at it.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for this opportunity to present my work to you.

Let me begin by saying something a little bit ominous. But don't worry, I'll follow it up right away with something much more reassuring.

This is the sort of study that makes anyone who does not actively work on it cross-eyed with boredom, it will make them roll their eyes at the total waste of NIH money, it will even go to the extent of making them swear upon their mothers' (or grandmothers', if the mothers are alive) graves that they will never, ever work on a project remotely like it.
But on the other hand, if you happen to work on something similar, you might find it a bit exciting.

Here's my promise to you today: that I will try my very best, my utmost to make the next 30 minutes mildly interesting, and who knows, may be even exciting, to the 99.9% of you who don't work on this stuff, who will never care about this stuff and who don't see even the remotest point in it.

Let me tell you what I'll be talking about. I'll begin with the our main tissue of interest (hurray for this tissue! Who doesn't love it?). After some background on how it regulates its function, I'll go forth to the basic premise of this study. Why we did what we did and why we thought it would be a good idea.

This is a difficult study- you have no idea how much we struggled to get the samples we needed and the fact that we have had so much difficulty publishing this stuff should tell you just how much we struggled to get even the samples we did. Reviewers, darn them, just don't like unmatched samples from random patients.

This is also a really expensive study. So, I hope you will understand, at the end of my talk, why we spent so many hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it. And why I spent more than 2 years trying to make sense of the ginormous terabytes of data it yielded. But I hope to convince you, by the end of my talk, that it really does make sense to do it this way, that there are serious biological phenomena that can be understood from the analyses that we have done.

Hmm... so, right, aims and objectives of this study.... well, let me be frank here. We didn't really have much of an aim to start out with, or any hypotheses. It's like a fishing project really. We hoped, when we did this, to get something interesting that would help us diagnose... anything, really. But I do have one section of my analysis that is hypothesis-driven. So that's something.

I won't bore you with the multitudinous reams of analyses that I've done on this data. It would go against my initial credo not to let you get cross-eyed with boredom. So I'll just share some small snippets of relatively interesting findings.

I will conclude this talk by telling you a bit about our future directions. Some of you might consider this mostly hand-waving, driven less by evidence than by fervent desires and fervid dreams. But I can assure that we do have some preliminary data, in the pipeline, that supports our initial findings.

So, let's begin!