It all began in my junior year. In the Indian education system you are offered mutiple choices in your junior year to pick the field you want to pursue for further studies from the three main domains namely, Sciences, Commerce and Arts. Science had been an obvious choice for me but Biology was a subject I had always regarded as not my forte. Naturally you would think why years later I am writing a blog post about biology, well let me narrate what happened back in 2016. I was just joining my tuitions to start the early classes to prepare for competitive exams and I had gone to an advanced math class. In that 90 minute lecture although I had been good at math I had a hard time visualizing those numbers and the way they worked in the system. It all seemed so bland and uninteresting, those numbers and the formulas didnt excite me, I didnt have questions and my mind was not stimulated by solving those equations. It was in that moment that I made a decision that has shaped my future.

So I went ahead to my instructor, told him I wanted to change my field and moved ahead into biology. For 16 years of my life I had told everyone I ever met that I would never study biology because it seemed like too much information to remember, and without mugging up you could never score in the subject. There seemed like no questions were being asked only information was provided to remember. But that perspective changed as I started studying more in depth about the subject. The deeper you explore biology the more interesting it gets, and the more opportunities for asking questions become available. We know the basics of diseases, for example lets discuss cancer; It starts with a mutation in one single cell that starts replicating rapidly with no regulation which causes cancer. But when you ask why this cell started replicating crazily there can be a series of answers. The checkpoints of the cell might have been damaged during cell division one of the million cellular pathways might have been disturbed, one of the thousands of enzymes working in the cell might not work properly or maybe a letter from the DNA sequence was not trannscripted into the RNA or the RNA might not have translated the sequence properly into its protein sequence. There can be millions of possibilities that could have lead to the unregulated division of the cell. Come to think of it the human body is the most well oiled machine in the world with millions of different parts working in harmony 24/7 for the 70-80 years of our lives without resting with an accuracy of 99.99% in all its processes. Now you tell me isn’t that fascinating?

Leave a comment below if you have your own fascinating biology story to share.