Long ago, I was recruited by a colleague to talk to grade seven and eight students about my work. I prepared a nice talk full of snappy colour pictures, neglecting what my Little League coaching experiences taught me about the attention span of the average thirteen year old. There were no new converts to biology that day.
The next year, obviously because this particular teacher wanted to involve real scientists with her students and couldn't find anybody else, I was invited back. This time, I spoke about the travel opportunities provided by the scientific life, the three universities I attended, and my science friends around the world who could provide a free bed for the night. This riveting personal narrative was mixed with talk about the involvement of observation (I threw a ball at a wall and it came back), experiment (I threw a ball against a wall ten times and it came back nine times; I missed the wall once) and theory (balls thrown at walls tend to come back) in the scientific method. I obviously scored more points this time, and a pretty redhead asked my first question in two years: "Have you always been a nerd?"
Always quick on my feet, I answered, "Why? Am I nerd now?" Before the girl could give the obvious reply, the teacher scolded her and the next student was asking for the name of my friends who might put him up for the night in London. I was not invited back a third time.
Like most high school students, my approach to the future was aimless, and I chose my first university because two of my sisters had gone there. Our guidance counsellor in high school was useless; in one of his awkward attempts at bonhomie, he once asked me, in a loud nasal voice, in front of all my friends in the lunch room, "Why are you eating that banana?" During our only interview to consider my future, he berated me for not knowing what an engineer was, evidently the top choice on my aptitude test. I still don't know what an engineer is.
I enrolled in science because this is what all my sisters did. I enrolled in the advanced class for each subject of the holy scientific trinity, biology, chemistry and physics, because I had the marks. My secret desire was to become a biochemist (not an antibiotic, as my Italian construction coworkers understood) or an astronomer, or possibly even an astronomical biochemist. I needed to keep all options open, especially because this university offered neither a biochemistry nor an astronomy degree, although you could double major in an infinite combination of subdisciplines.
Physics was the first to fall. I didn't like pure physics much, but had a pleasant initiation to astronomy through the club hosted by the local university, who let us use their observatory and mini-planetarium. The group was overseen by a kind but absent-minded Jesuit priest, for whom the purpose of astronomy was to sing the glory of God's universe, not an excuse for complicated mathematics. The first lab exercise in my advanced first year physics course involved lenses, mirrors, beams of light, trigonometry and logarithmic tables. I was way over my head and knew it. I dropped down to the regular physics course, which eliminated any chance of an astronomy double major later. When I retrieved my only assignment for the advanced lab, just to see how bad the grade was, the teaching assistant couldn't believe I had dropped the course. "You're the only one who passed the lab," he said.
Second year started with the biochemistry dream still alive. The dreaded mandatory Analytical Chemistry, with good reason usually abbreviated as Anal Chem, stood in the way like a chainsaw waving mass murderer. The course had a six hour lab each week but no lectures, instead of the normal three hour labs that weeny courses offered. You started at 2:30 and kept going until 8:30, and if you went off for a snack or quick supper, you weren't allowed back in the lab. Unlike other lab courses, you could never finish; the lab manual had an endless series of meaningless experiments that even the most gifted student could never complete. Like a game of Angry Birds, you could not advance to the next experiment until the first one was completed with a passing grade, but you could repeat the same experiment over and over until you got a grade you liked.
At the beginning of the first lab, the senior demonstrator, a demonic woman who seemed chemically bonded into her greyish lab coat, told us, "The other demonstrators and I are not here to help you. We are here to make sure you don't kill yourselves or blow up the building." Before we could begin actual experiments, we had to learn to clean glassware properly. I spent three hours cleaning one flask for the first experiment, until triple distilled water dripped without leaving mini-rivulets indicating invisible specks of dust. To this day, I hate cleaning glassware. The teaching assistants sneered like sadistic egg-stealing pigs at the anxious undergrads scrubbing away at their beakers. By the end of the six hour lab, I had botched the acid-base titration twice, finally scraping by on the last attempt to earn a tepid single star. I stumbled out of the lab, my mind mush, my stomach growling.
There was only one way to escape Anal Chem; drop any thoughts of a biochemistry major. The agony and uncertainty of that decision, made on the last possible day for rearranging courses, still frighten me. It amazes me how a choice made on one day of life can determine everything that happens to you; where you live, how you live, who you love. These life-altering days cascade through the lives of those around us as they tumble through such seminal days of their own.
My story is less dramatic than that of a colleague who fell asleep in a lecture after a long partying night as a surfer dude. He woke up in the wrong lecture, his life changed forever. For me, biology was always there on my family's agonizingly slow flower and bird meanders in the woods. I was a kid who liked running around, mud, splashing in puddles. I was always more interested in the worms, beetles and skinks that the dog unearthed during her manic excavations of dirt and rotten wood.
With physics already off the table, there was only one soft spot to land: Biology. Finally settled into the pursuit of a real degree, I resumed my bad first year habits, reading student newspapers and science fiction magazines during lectures, checking the blackboard now and then to take notes. Along the way, mostly during Introductory Ecology lectures, I read Lewis Thomas's wonderful The Lives of a Cell. But some of the courses were magic. Dropping out of Analytical Chemistry, I dropped into a course that I would only have taken by force. It unexpectedly directed me toward my life's work, and the adoption of the study of the science of life as a philosophical basis for living life itself.
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