This field is not necessarily glamorous, nor does it often produce immediate results, but it seeks to increase our basic understanding of living processes.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Through art and science in their broadest senses it is possible to make a permanent contribution towards the improvement and enrichment of human life and it is these pursuits that we students are engaged in.
You make a great investment in the consumer Internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences, you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound.
Our world is built on biology and once we begin to understand it, it then becomes a technology.
The research I have been doing - studying how foodstuffs yield energy in living cells - does not lead to the kind of knowledge that can be expected to give immediate practical benefits to mankind. If I have chosen this field of study, it was because I believed in its importance in spite of its theoretical character.
Our science fails to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world - biocentrism - revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one that I have pursued my entire life.
I think that we scientists are seeking an understanding of the natural world. We come in various types - chemists and physicists and biologists and such - and we all have the same goal. We are making progress.
It is the cells which create and maintain in us, during the span of our lives, our will to live and survive, to search and experiment, and to struggle.
Life is simply the reification of the process of living.
We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of ourselves. And they do it in a way that reflects what we dream ourselves capable of doing.
Biology, it's the technology which builds our world, and we can harness it to shift humanity from a scarcity to an abundance economy.