Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.
I remember the first time I looked at pond water under a microscope.
It was just a droplet suspended beneath a glass lens. But, within this tiny sphere was something I hadn't expected. An entire ecosystem alive with interactions invisible to the naked eye.
Unlike the stereotypical aliens you see on television, these were quieter forms of life: green shapes that rotated, collided, and slipped rapidly out of my field of view.
I was in bliss. My inner Charles Darwin surfaced, suddenly confronted with a collection of life I couldn't name fast enough. It was a natural instinct for me to classify and to make sense of the endless variation unfolding in front of me.
I remember adjusting the focus again and again, as if clarity would give me understanding. But even at its sharpest, it was still a mystery. I could see that something was happening. I just didn't know what it meant.
Years later, I find myself staring at something just as invisible, but in a completely different way.
There's no glass slide now. No droplet being scattered across with electrons. Instead of microbes, I study proteins. It's a different kind of world, one defined not by motion I can watch, but by interactions I have to imagine.
Structures fold in on themselves, shaped by forces I can't see directly. Small changes ripple outward, altering form, changing function. What once looked like movement under a microscope now exists as structure and possibility on a screen.
Irrespective of the scale, my love for the scientific process has always revolved around the same fundamental question: what am I really looking at?
I used to think that as I learned more biology, things would become clearer. But the opposite happened. The closer I got, the less I could rely on sight alone.
The world didn't become simpler. It became deeper.
And so my curiosity changed with it. Not to just observe, but to build abstractions, to trace patterns, to make sense of reactions I can't directly see.
I'm still asking the same questions.
I'm still adjusting the focus.