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I Love Biology Part I: The Replicators and The Blind Watchmaker
A few months ago, I read James Sommer’s article on the flaws on biological pedagogy: aptly called “I should have loved biology”. As a mathematically inclined teenager who thought he was going to be an engineer, I had the very experience that Sommer’s wished he had had with biology. Freshman year at MIT, I took a alternative biology class with Michael Laub (who was later my biology advisor) and Hidde Plough. While other biology classes, especially cell biology, were identical to what Sommer’s complained about in his article, this class was different. We covered the Avery experiment, and all the other experiments that eventually led to the labeling of DNA as the master template molecule. We constructed a scaled-down model of how the DNA alignment algorithm works. We learned about CRISPR, gut microbiome manipulation and gene drives, well enough to understand the basics of how they worked. The class didn’t fully realize Sommer’s dream of bottom-up biological understanding. But it was close enough to make me realize that biology was that kind of discipline, like math had been for me in highschool. And that class, more than anything else, is why I became a biologist.
The rest of my biology (and honestly computer science too) education did not live up to the standards set by that class. But it gave me the tools to be able to start building…
