Anindya Barua
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on the atlas — 2
- I should have loved biology36 savers
- Why the FDA Is Slow to Remove Drugs1 savers
highlights — 6
I think my understanding of biology was too flow-charty in high school. I knew that DNA → RNA → protein and that this was called “gene expression,” but I was confused on the basics, like, how did genes actually “turn on”? And once they were on, were they on for good? It’s clearer when you think physically. Mammalian DNA isn’t laid out as one long double helix; it’s tightly coiled and coiled again, like this, around little circular proteins called histones:
I should have loved biologyI think my understanding of biology was too flow-charty in high school.
I should have loved biologyBut biology, like computing, has a bottom, and the bottom is not abstract. It’s physical.
I should have loved biologyBiology is no different. Learning begins with questions.
I should have loved biologyEnormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.
I should have loved biologyIn biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We were nowhere acquainted with real biologists, the real questions they had, the real experiments they did to answer them. We were just given their conclusions.
I should have loved biology