Friday, December 16, 2011

Mystery of Christmas

I am an older parent with young children. With Christmas approaching, I always view the holiday season with some sadness. I lament the fact that the mystery and wonder of Christmas, when Santa and his reindeer really could fly, is a distant memory of my childhood—that something has been lost. I rejoice in the fact that I get to re-live the excitement and the awe of Christmas through my children, but still...
My experience of Christmas seems similar to my experience in the lab. I remember the excitement and mystery of those early days in the lab. I remember the wonder at seeing colonies grow from my streaks of bacterial culture, and from isolating DNA and being able to generate bacteria with new properties. Now I spend a lot of time at my desk and on the internet. But, I recently rekindled some of the wonder and excitement of those early years in the lab while working on a food-safety chip for Beacon Biotechnology.
My task (and the task of my longtime friend and Senior Scientist, Tony) was to design capture probes for the chip that could uniquely identify food pathogens such as Salmonella and Listeria. Looking at regions of homology and the unique sequences in the DNA of pathogenic bacteria--the convergence and divergence of sequences-- reveals the connection of these organisms to each other and their genetic drift from each other over time. It was an exercise of great Beauty.
I thought the emotions I felt in seeing the connections between these bacteria might be unique to me. However, in a conversation with Tony about this project, Tony remarked on the great Beauty that he is privileged to experience in the course of his work. Tony also saw the connections. He lamented the fact that scientists don’t do a very good job of talking about (or never talking about) the profound and maybe unspeakable Beauty in what we do.
This is my first Avidity blog. One of my goals for this blog, besides generating topics of interest and creating a scientific dialogue, is to give voice to the Beauty that we are privileged to see.
Next blog: Awesome Biology