Truth with a capital T

My first year in graduate school my fellow students a I were slogging through a research article in a required  seminar course when the professor told us “you all are not excited enough, there are only two reasons to be a scientist, either because you want to save the world or because you want to discover the TRUTH with a capital T.” It is true, the dedication and commitment to be scientist requires this kind of zeal.  I am more of the second kind of scientist; I am driven to study biology because I am intensely curious about the world around me.  When I was 4 or 5 years old I was talking to my dad about dinosaurs and why they became extinct.  “It’s a mystery” he told me, but I just couldn’t stand the fact of not knowing and that I might not ever know.  I remember asking him “do you think when I die and go to heaven that God will tell me why?”  This being a complicated theological question my dad had no answer for me.  

Now there is a general consensus that the dinosaurs died out in a massive extinction event caused by an asteroid that struck the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.  And honestly, I do feel much better having this answer; it gives me comfort to know that plausible answers can be given to some of life’s biggest mysteries.  Of course discovering such Truths is an elusive goal that is based on the work of many scientists working together and separately (sometimes antagonistically) over long periods of time, with each experiment contributing an incremental step forward.  We are constantly revising and updating our knowledge sometime discarding old “truths” entirely and replacing them with new ones.   The debate about exactly how and why dinosaurs died out continues and it is likely that in the years to come our understanding of how this extinction event occurred will continue to evolve or be changed entirely based on new evidence.

The world around us is so amazing that it fills me with wonder and like a little kid I constantly find myself asking “why?”  My goal in starting this blog is to share with you why I think Biology is so cool and interesting, talk about the process of doing science and discuss how and whether understanding biology can help us make sense of the world and our own lives.

I welcome all comments and suggestions especially if you have a question you would like answered about biology or biologists.   Please comment here on my blog or send me an email at bioluminessa@gmail.com