Today, I was at the 2011 BIO International conference, one of the world's largest bio/pharma gatherings, in Washington DC, and I happened upon the Pfizer booth.

I asked the two Pfizer men there, "So, how often do people come up and ask for free Viagra as a joke?"

The two guys rolled their eyes. A Pfizer woman nearby shot me this look like I was touching upon a sore subject, like I was about to beat a dead horse, for the 117th time.

It was a big lame joke for awhile and it peaked a decade ago, one Pfizer guy said, tracing his finger in the air in an upward trajectory, like an imaginary fever chart. For the past several years, he said, people haven't been cracking the joke so much at conventions, they said. We figured out the jokes probably peaked around 1999-2000, held strong for a few years, and then dwindled away. Sorta like a .... oh, nevermind.

Plus, Pfizer can't really give out free samples of Viagra at conventions, he said. You need a prescription, silly!

So, there you go. Save the Viagra free-sample jokes when you see the Pfizer folks -- they won't think you're funny.

But I wasn't in D.C. to schmooze with Big Pharma. I was there to take a look at "BioMaryland."

Maryland's biotech industry this week is abuzz this week with involvement in the BIO conference in D.C.

I hung out at the Maryland pavilion, a patch of Old Line State in a sea of national and international exhibitors. It really took seeing scores of states and countries represented at this convention to bring it home that, by golly, biotech is a huge worldwide industry, and not one that the U.S. should take for granted in terms of competition.

Gov. Martin O'Malley came down from Annapolis and presented a state-of-the-industry report on Maryland's biotech sector (in a nutshell, the industry is stable, despite the recession, and employing people with good pay.)

There were a bunch of companies in the Maryland pavilion that you may or may not have heard of, such as Human Genome Sciences (makes a lupus drug and has a long history of working with human DNA), Dynaport Vaccine Co. LLC (makes vaccines for flu, plague and botulinum), and Integrated Biotherapeutics (makes an Ebola vaccine and staph infection treatments), to name a few. Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland system were well represented, as were economic development folks from Annapolis, Frederick and Hagerstown. Who did I miss?

This convention is HUGE. About 15,000 people attend it every year. And it's known for being not just a place to network, but also a venue for wheeling and dealing. In addition to thousands of square feet of exhibition space, state agencies and companies had an entire other hall dedicated to business development meetings. Here's a photo I took of one of the series of office spaces for the biopharma mover-and-shaker dealmakers.





If all goes well, the state organizations and companies that are representing Maryland will be able to walk away from this conference with the early beginnings of some fruitful deals in the future.

I took some photos of the Maryland pavilion and of its neighbors, including several Mid-Atlantic states that were staked out around the Maryland booths. Have a look on the jump: