A myriad of
thoughts race through my brain moments after the end credits of Interstellar
started rolling. Despite the movie being a little (maybe a lot) too ambitious,
there were many interesting elements to explore in the dark hole that is my
brain. Confusion abound, but one word stood out in the horizon – bravery
(you’ll get the puns if you watched the movie).
The courage
that Cooper, Brand, and the other astronauts had. To venture into the unknown.
This concept is no stranger to fans of science fiction. However, the concept is
often described as a sense of wonder, that the sense of curiosity and wonder is
the underlying drive behind the brave space explorers who dare to risk their
life to explore new worlds. What stands out to me most about these story-lines,
is the courage. And the faith. The faith that Cooper and Brand put into
Professor Brand, the trust they had for his vision, despite it being built upon
a lie.
These are movie characters, but we
see this in real life space exploration. Only last year did tens of thousands
of people sign up for a one-way trip to Mars. Most people think that these
people must be crazy. They must not have much to live for on Earth, that they
are so desperate for attention, or an escape, or fame and a name in the history
books. However, when you read into these people’s stories, most of them appear
to be very reasonable and rational people. Most of these people have loving
families who support their decision. Some are couples that signed up together,
knowing that there is an insurmountable chance that only one of them will be
picked for the mission. Why are these seemingly rational, intelligent, people
making these seemingly rash, irresponsible decisions?
Economists explain that people are
inherently irrational. But are they? To us, the weather appears to be
irrational (there is a 60% chance of rain my ass, weather-man). We know that
the weather is rational though. We just don’t have all the data to make
accurate predictions. If we had enough data and a super-super computer, we
could predict the weather to nearly 100% accuracy. Yes, our understanding of
the weather is already at this level, but our technology is lagging behind.
Maybe humans are indeed rational, and we just don’t have enough understanding
and ways to quantify our thoughts to predict our actions accurately. By
definition, if we can summarize all of our thought patterns, even if they are
“irrational” from an outsider perspective, they must be rational. When we do
things at a given moment, we do think that we are making rational decisions. It
is only after the fact, when we have more data (actual outcome of our actions,
probably very negative outcomes that have caused us much pain), do we realize
that the decisions were not rational.
What am I trying to get at? I think
that we are all rational beings, it is that we do not have enough data, or ways
to measure what has happened, to make accurate predictions, so we make
seemingly irrational decisions. But this is bravery. It is venturing into the
unknown, when there isn’t enough data yet to accurately predict what will be
the outcome, putting faith (not “blind” faith, since nobody really does that)
in other people and the data they have provided you. That is courage.
From this view of the universe,
everyone has been, and will be, extremely brave at some point in their life.
Every single person has put their faith into what someone else told them, and
acted accordingly. We do this not only because we don’t have enough time to
measure every single data point, but because we are inherently trusting beings.
But trust requires bravery, because we have to believe that the person we trust
has our best interests in mind, or at least share a common benefit from
whatever they are trying to convince us to endeavor.
How does this relate to science? Or
to molecular biology, my field of study? Well, some of the bravest people I
know are scientists. They might not be brave in that they dare to explore black
holes, or jump off a cliff, or fight a bear, but they are brave in that they give
their life to exploring the unknown. They pour their intelligence, their time,
their money, their everything, into something that nobody has a clue about.
They put forth this incredible sacrifice because of the slight chance that they
might become a faculty member, only to suffer even greater unknowns, long
nights writing grants that will be denied, failed projects, failed graduate
students? I think not. They put forth this incredible sacrifice because they
put their faith in their mentor, their post-doc advisor, their Ph.D. mentor,
their boss. They believe that their mentor has given them a project that will
flourish and explain something about the universe that nobody has ever known,
that will help others to understand the universe, to cure disease, to uncover
the meaning of life. Their mentor in turn puts great faith into the ability and
integrity of their student or post-doc, that they will be able to execute the
experiments needed to uncover this great piece of knowledge no one has ever
known.
Recently, my mentor, Oliver Rando,
received a huge grant from the National Institute of Health, a Pioneer Award.
$500,000 will be awarded to our lab each year for five years to explore the
mechanism(s) of intergenerational epigenetic inheritance. These awards are
rewarded to proposals with a high risk but high reward potential. Most of the
grant stems from work done by Upasna Sharma, a post-doc in the lab. When she
joined the lab, previous lab members have been working for years to uncover
possible pathways of epigenetic information transfer, to no avail. The lab was
well-funded but not greatly so. The lab was modest in size, and a focus on
chromatin modifications. The mouse project looked promising, but with no clear
direction. However, she put her faith on Ollie (that’s what we called our
boss), and Ben (a previous post-doc), and Jeremy (a Ph.D. candidate who has
been working on the project for 6 years), in the data they have generated, in
the direction that Ollie envisioned for the project. She trusted these people.
And she was extremely brave on taking on this project. In less than a year, her
work has shown that tRNA fragments, a type of small-RNAs, appear to be
transferred to sperm via exosomes during its maturation, and that these tRNA
fragments might carry some sort of epigenetic message to the offspring, leading
to higher expression of a set of genes important for placental formation, and
thus may contribute to differential metabolic patterning in the offspring. I
have to admit, I would not have been brave enough to take on the project if I
was in her position. I would have said that she was being irrational. But look
where her bravery has taken her, and taken me, and taken the lab. Ollie has
received a huge grant directly from the data she has collected, and now the lab
is expanding. We now have the resources and man-power to study everything
related to this project. We are even buying our own deep-sequencing
machine??!!!!?!?!!?!
To all the brave people in the
world, I raise my glass to you. Your actions may seem irrational from an
outsider’s perspective. They might prove to be bad decisions in the end
(alternatively, is any decision ever a “bad” decision”?), but you made the
decision. You dedicated your life to these decisions. You trusted someone, or
many people at the same time, to make these decisions. You dared to venture
into the unknown, knowing the risks that you would have to take, but you
endured, and you came through the worm hole into the other side, and the other
side, is oh so beautiful. That is bravery. That is love. That is what we are.
We are scientists.
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