I believe we each have our own sense of the world; each sound, each sight, each touch, each taste, each scent stimulates our minds and our emotions in it's own particular way. A fog horn may be horrendous for one person and tolerable, if not slightly annoying, for the next. I can't stand the scent of peanut butter, meanwhile someone else may be watering at the very thought. Roses are all lovely to one person, and all thorns to the next. Beauty is but a figment of our own individual perception. We construct the world we live in, but we did not construct ourselves.
We choose to cut our fingernails, but who decided that they were to have that particular shape? You can dye your hair every shade of iridescence, but naturally it's always going to be a color you cannot control. Physically, we are born a certain way, and the different stimuli around us shape us into the person we become, yet the way we look physically affects our surroundings, the way people see us, the way we can respond to the world, and, in turn, we mold the world as it molds us.
So what decided this mold? Where does the world stop and where does our true essence begin? Or rather, does it ever really end? All these questions are mighty philosophical, but science, more specifically genetics, can provide some answers. By defining one's essence as the information stored within the DNA of one's own cells, we can determine what exactly is out of our control. Genetics gives us leeway to say that we don't choose who we are a hundred percent of the way; we have an excuse for who we are, however measly the percent.
I want to entangle myself in our genome, pick its codons so to speak, discover which genes control what. I recently discovered that roughly 2% of the genome is genes and the other 98% constitutes in instructions for activation and deactivation. This "junk DNA", as it was previously thought to be, can hold many keys to our bodies processes through life. I want to learn to what extent we are ourselves and to what extent we are code.
I want to travel around the world and see how each environment - the plants, the animals, the temperature, the climate - have affected each group of people. How close are we really to our Sub-Saharan ancestors? Are our emotions really innate and how do we differ from culture to culture in our expression of them?
Perhaps all of these questions lead to the ultimate most unanswerable of all questions: Who are we? Who are we in what we do, what we think, and in what we innately are?
To me science is the religion of questions, of ponderings, of frustratingly beautiful mysteries just waiting to be cracked with each scientist a small chip in the frame work of our combined realities. I doubt we will ever crack it in my lifetime, but I want to make my dent and contribute to the life-long effort which is discovery.
Infinitesimal
We are 7 10^9
Are we?
Who is we?
A worth that cancels
or multiplies
or divides
into a zero so grand it
stretches toward the sun.
Yet, we span into eons
corded tightly into mesh with which
to capture our human faults.
Our breath
silent within our lungs has been so
much more than we dreamed.
We breathe
breathing
breaths
that once were hydrogen on a distant
star, and a scale of shimmery bits at the bottom
of a Himalayan pool, and
remnants of an arthropod’s clacking
rigid spines.
Infinity we become,
we who are already infinite.
We who were born clutching galaxies
that spooled into our DNA and
we who have absorbed the dying light
of a thousand stars
into our retinas.
We who will walk into
the memories of the millions
of years ahead.
But what if we are blurred
into a sea of 7 billion?
Canceled out by fate?
Will our atoms continue to be called
by our names and
wander in melancholic clusters
or will they be chemically
combined into a bird’s wing
or a coral polyp
or the mirage between fiction
and reality?
Life is too short to wonder
and death is too long to ponder
so I’ll settle my soul
in the coils of quarks
in the nooks of certainty
in the ridges of footprints
and dream
of infinity.
What questions do you have about the world that you would like to answer?
I close,
Sofia Braunstein
