The Complete Idiot’s guide to thinking like a Scientist

['Complete' here refers to the Idiot. This is by no means a comprehensive guide to mastering the impossible task of thinking like a Scientist.]

Everyone in the department is excited about the new zebra fish facility. As am I. To them, it represents the ultimate system to observe physiological changes in real time. To me, it is the most beautiful floor-to-ceiling aquarium. So, we do agree on the basic premise – it’s fun to have some fish around :)

Now that I have convinced you that I am not qualified to give this lesson, let me go ahead and defend it – well, who better than the idiot to write the idiot’s guide?

Don’t get me wrong – few things fascinate me more than the intricacies and nuances of the ingeniously designed biological system. I have spent many an hour of my twenty-something life explaining to people this theme of simple complexity that Nature has recurringly and successfully employed, right from CAM pathways in plants to glycogen metabolism in human beings. But I have always fallen short of getting my message across, mostly because halfway down the road, I am gushing profusely and effusing wonderment and my voice is coming out all squeaky and unintelligible.

Yeah, if it is possible, I am too fascinated. Too fascinated to even begin to explain in any semblance of order or conceivable pattern this amazing phenomenon. Too fascinated to believe that what I read about Nature’s unique engineering in the textbook can be successfully transposed to the laboratory bench. Too fascinated to think I can change any of it, much less, make it better.

Nature has designed the simplest most complicated system that can do all the wonderful things it so effortlessly does. If we toggle with it, we are either altering its simplicity so it no longer works or its complexity so it can no longer do everything it does.

Years ago, during my first real encounter with bench science, when I was trying to convince myself as much as the world that the little blue blob on the gel was really the protein it was claiming to be, my then scientific guru told me that a frightening fascination with text book science was causing my obvious reluctance to go out there and see for myself if it works on the bench -- paraphrasing -- You like to sit at a desk and philosophize about Nature and her myriad ways. You don’t want to get out there and do it where it matters, where it changes the world.

Sure, I countered, but there is a big assumption there: that it changes the world. On some level, I guess I am a scientist: I am almost always able to interject an assumption behind a perfectly valid statement that successfully weakens it – or even better - negates it ;) That’s what scientists do and that’s why they spend so much time doing what they do.

All said, I don’t want to deny my friend’s assessment. While I sincerely believe (yeah, yeah somewhere deep in the bottom of my heart) that my rantings on religion and politics are going to ring some bell somewhere and enlighten someone and advance another, I quite honestly don’t think that my playing with the micropipette is going to make any real difference to the world or its beings.

And yet I enjoy my fantasies of wayward, far-off things. I think “romancing with Science” is the term I am looking for. I walk into the ES cell culture room and wonder if a Jurassic Park grade experiment can be performed with the mice we have and the frozen woolly mammoth can be brought back to life. Surely, somewhere in the ice-caps of Serbia, some DNA should be buried untouched... And I have spent a good amount of my undergrad years exchanging letters (back when Rowland hill’s system was still the predominant one to exchange ideas in India) on Charles Darwin’s theories with a fellow evolution enthusiast wondering if the chicken came before the egg and if so, how.

I look at protein crystallography and drug discovery with a jaundiced eye. Paper publishing science, is my term for it, and yet, that is the science that might find a cure for AIDS some day. I pick up a paper from a 1970 copy of the journal, Nature and look longingly at creative science done in an age devoid of microarrays and biocomputing, little realizing that these toys are aiding and expediting research that would otherwise take eons.

“We haven’t yet understood the most basic systems of Nature. Why are we already beginning to alter it?” is my oft-repeated question. Because, understanding why the fish lost their gills and developed lungs is not going to change the world, but finding a way to inject DNA encoding insulin is, says a little voice in the back of my head. I ignore it and open Stryer’s Biochemistry to marvel at the magic that is the sodium-potassium pump in the dopaminergic neuron.

Yeah, in the case of Changing world vs. Nature, I am quite unequivocally on the side of the latter.

It’s funny that while I look at most things in life through the left side of my brain, I look at the logical, practical realm of science through the right.

As a researcher I know I should be spending more time thinking about the future of Science, but I’d much rather wonder about the past; my contemplation of the future is restricted to pondering the fate of the Bush presidency or India’s economic standing a decade from now.

And then a few days ago, the funniest thing happened. My co-worker came up to me and said that my mouse had arrived. “Really? The one with the CRE transgene?” I wondered out aloud. She just smiled and pointed to a taped white box in the corner. 'Apple mighty mouse for iBook G-4' the box proclaimed.

Voila! I had done it. After a decade in the field, I had finally begun to think like a scientist. And I hear it’s an irreversible process…