There is a special pleasure in learning that long-held assumptions about your limits are not true. Having realized that I do in fact love Brussels sprouts and country music, my sphere of possible satisfactions expanded appreciably wider. However, this type of realization is particularly powerful when the newly opened territory is a skill or field that you once thought was only for people smarter than you.
For me, this shift has occurred twice: first to the biological sciences, and more recently to the math, physics and computer science-tinged world of quantitative biology. Unfortunately, many people never stop excluding science from the Venn diagram of things they think they can understand.
A commonly used metaphor is that of lacking the “head”, “brain”, or “gene” for science. This invocation of biological hardware underscores people’s belief that no amount of teaching or explanation could make science accessible to them. They feel as if they literally lack the required parts. Meanwhile, a scientist is someone born with an extra bit of science brain hardware (often, the story goes, at the expense of social skills brain hardware), endowing them with the computer-like power to say big words and draw conclusions from staring at test tubes.
Now a third year PhD student in immunology, I did not spring out of the womb with a micropipette in hand. For fifteen years, I never considered myself scientifically inclined—I liked talking and writing, neither of which are common cultural signifiers for “science.” It was only when sophomore biology teacher Dr. Cristina Weaver began illuminating the machinery of cells that I came to feel the pull. My newly ignited interest never gave me a chance to pause and object that I wasn’t a “science person”.
Recently, my first year graduate student quest to pick a thesis lab provided another example of disintegrating self-limitations. As a self-proclaimed “non-math, non-computer science person”, the laboratory of Dr. Altan-Bonnet—who has a joint appointment in the immunology and computational biology departments—inspired an initial reaction of “nope, not for me.” Upon closer examination, I realized that the questions the lab was investigating—how does the immune system distinguish between benign self proteins and foreign pathogens?—were in fact the ones that intrigued me the most. During my rotation, my lab-fellows lucidly explained how modeling the behavior of T-cells using differential equations and comparing the model’s predictions to experimental results is a powerful tool to probe our knowledge of the system. They also taught me to break free from the shackles of Microsoft Excel and process my data by writing my own code. Two years later, I’m very glad to have taken the path more quantitative, and grateful for the instruction and support that allowed me to abandon my perceived limits.
Having peeled back the curtain of disciplines I once considered to be out of my league, I can’t help but want to leap into action any time an adult or student says “I’ll never understand science.” The goal of this blog is to explore the ways that researchers and teachers can open up the world of contemporary science to students, as they did for me.
