NAVEL GAZING
Cindy Maddera
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I was sitting at my desk, working on my Journal Club presentation, while Michael was sitting on the couch watching a documentary about people who believe the earth is flat. I could hear the documentary and suddenly my eye started twitching. The eye twitch has been happening a lot since I’ve been working from home. It started about three weeks ago after spending a whole day working on a coding assignment for the class I’m taking. I thought it had something to do with spending too much time looking at a screen. I spent a weekend not looking at a screen and it didn’t solve the problem.
The eye twitch is a stress response.
I spend a fair amount of time reading the latest publications and statistics. I’ve learned more virology in the past four weeks than I learned in my first year in the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics department at OSU. My brain is filled up with science and what that science could mean for our future. And there’s so much crap misinformation floating around. All of it makes me want to take my brain out of my skull and scrub it with a scrub brush. I’ve taken to just reporting the misinformation and hate speech memes so all of it just gets taken down and I don’t waste my time on validating research. Because that is exhausting.
One would think that I would have more time for internal reflection and I did do some of that today. I thought about stubbornness. I thought about stubbornly holding onto a belief even when the facts and science do not align with those beliefs. For me, it has always been easy to change my belief when faced with the evidence. It has happened to me so many times in my own career and I have heard it hundreds of times from other scientists when presenting their research. “We believed this thing would happen, but when we performed the experiment, something else happened instead.” So many times, the outcome turns out to be not what was predicted. I recently watched a presentation from a scientist working with amyloids. Amyloids are aggregates of proteins and anyone who is paying attention to Alzheimer’s has heard this word. The general consensus is that amyloids are bad news, but a lot of what we know about amyloid buildup is from research done in a test tube, not a living system. Not all amyloids are bad. In fact fruit flies use amyloids in memory formation. We are starting to discover that the way proteins fold together to form amyloids is actually more important than the presence of amyloids. Scientists are having to change the way they think about protein structures and function. The questions are constantly evolving.
I stubbornly hold onto the quest for truth while recognizing that truths are not always constant. So… that really makes me no different from those who stubbornly hold onto a belief.