disappointment with how biology was taught to him, highlighting the lack of awe-inspiring curiosity and real-life applications
Why do we learn about "lipid bilayers" and "endoplasmic reticula" without a clue why they matter? It's like learning dance moves without knowing the music!
Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was.
It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs.
In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We were nowhere acquainted with real biologists, the real questions they had, the real experiments they did to answer them.
In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We
Oswald Avery, in the 1940s, puzzled over two cultures of Streptococcus bacteria. One had a rough texture when grown in a dish; the other was smooth, and glistened. Avery noticed that when he mixed the smooth strain with the rough strain, every generation after was smooth, too.
Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself.
Biology is no different. Learning begins with questions. How do embryos differentiate? Why are my eyes blue? How does a hamster turn cheese into muscle? Why does the coronavirus make some people much sicker than others? *
Everywhere you look—the compiler, the shell, the CPU, the DOM—is an abstraction hiding lifetimes of work.
an incredible book called The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, by Horace Freeland Judson.
Ninja Nerd Science’s videos on the immune system were a miracle—all delivered by a kid in grad school.
Reading list The Machinery of Life, David Goodsell Bionanotechnology: Lessons from Nature, David Goodsell A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology, William W. Cohen The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, Horace Freeland Judson
