what thou lovest well

I took MCB 143: Developmental Biology back in... I think it was Spring 2010, actually.

The way I've told it for years now, I say my "come to Biology" moment was in Cancer Biology, Spring 2009 -- that fateful semester I decided to go all into an upper division MCB class instead of a creative writing workshop with Giscombe. Or I talk about one early morning lecture that same semester in biochemistry when I saw DNA collapsed into a stained glass window. These are all really nice stories, which are true.

But I remember the first time I read every last assigned and supplementary reading, attended guest faculty lectures, office hours -- when I really thought I could make it, and I really found myself wanting to, was that following spring, when I took upper division Genetics, Genetics Lab, and Developmental Biology. 

Now that I'm getting back into evo-devo, that time is flooding back into my mind. Like this morning, I was sitting in a square of sun at the dining table reading this paper -- the one I have to present on Friday -- and I had this vivid flashback to sitting in a basement office with Professor Henk Roelink. I had to look him up; I'd completely forgotten his name, even though I remember going to his office hours early one morning during Spring Break. I had to wait outside because the doors to the building were locked. There was one other student who came, asked a question about recombination, I think, and left. (I am suddenly remembering now: It was recombination/tetrads, so he must have been the MCB 140 professor--whose yeast lectures I've remembered all these years, despite having forgotten his name....)

I can't remember how we got on the topic of his research... I think I was dying for a way to ask for a spot in his lab, really, but I remember forgetting all that as he turned on his huge dual monitors and gave me a little dry run of the figures for a talk he was planning to give at an upcoming international symposium. In it, he talked about sonic hedgehog transport through the cell (I remember now that it was human stem cells differentiated to some kind of quasi-neuronal fate), and how they were trying to discern vesicle trafficking. The focus was something to do with long-range hedgehog transport, and at one point, I asked, after all that painstaking packaging and shuttling, how hedgehog got from one cell to another one far away. Prof. Roelink beamed at me, told me that was an excellent question and that it was a mystery. Something-something gradients was the prevailing answer at the time, but no one knows, he said.  

I walked out of that office hours with a very odd and unfamiliar feeling... astonished that I had somehow tricked this very intelligent person into believing I could think and ask intelligent thoughts and questions; more astonished still that I had, perhaps, just stood for the first time along the limits of science, which I had thought I would never know enough to see; and then wondering if, just maybe, I was cut out for all this after all...

This whole colorful memory rushed into my mind the when something I read in the paper reminded me. This paper I am presenting for my first journal club as a graduate student is answering that first mystery I discerned with Prof. Roelink's guidance in office hours 8 years ago. (Only one citation removed from his work; the 2011 Callejo paper it so intently cites recapitulates his work with dispatched in the hedgehog pathway.)

All those intense feelings of belonging, those days and nights of poring into my studies, that person I believed was most truly and intensely and centrally my self. I didn't leave her behind when I came across the country to study medicine. That's still me. Also, I didn't cop out of her dreams; I'm living them now. 

What thou lovest well remains, 

                                                  the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage