Fair Introduction

Inch by inch, year by year, I succumbed to the power and wonder of science. Really, science eventually teaches you that you know very little. You can’t know the world outside of your observations of it. Moreover, all your observations are simply descriptions of the world that you make from perspectives arisen from an unholy mishmash of biases—known and unknown. How then to understand the world around us with certainty? We’ll never be certain. We’ll try anyway. Romance and ambition at once!

The key is that some of our descriptions of the world are more accurate than others. The difficult business of describing the world with growing accuracy attracts me. I can’t help it. I want to belong to the tribe of science. I want to be a scientist.

Now, I do not hail from a family of scientists—or academics, for that matter. I have no illustrious connections. I do belong to a racial group—swarthy, not fair—still stereotyped by an uncomfortable amount of Americans, including scientists, as intellectually deficient. My real gift is writing. I don’t want to write for an income, but I love to write. I suck at math—read: I have made it through single-variable calculus by studying harder than a true scientist should—and most of my instructors and friends think of me as a writer, not a scientist. They press me to be a writer. Like a bred-in-the-bone writer, I’m high-strung, manic-depressive, uptight, snobby, stubborn, overly sensitive, girly, gratuitously imaginative, naïve, vain, pensive, arrogant, introverted and self-critical. I’m also skinny and attractive, and most women are catty toward me—especially when they learn I’m not a bimbo. I majored in English as an undergrad years ago, and I devoted my time outside of class to student theater for the sake of a boy I worshipped. Both my college years and my grad school years were fraught with sordid drama. (I don’t want to admit it. I’m admitting it in the interest of full disclosure.) Most tellingly, I’ve spent more years thinking superstitiously than rationally. So I know I have no business being a scientist. With my background and my temperament, how dare I think of being a scientist? Science is for special people!

Nevertheless, last year, as an old maid of twenty-seven, I quit a master’s degree program in archaeology to pursue a career in medical genetics. I have spent the last year recovering from a nasty experience, sporadically working embarrassingly odd jobs and worrying my quaint parents, with whom I get along imperfectly, but with whom I get along better since my mother’s recent recovery from breast cancer, and whom I know I have let down . . . especially since I did go to Berkeley and all. But I have also spent the last year plotting. At this juncture, I have figured out that the first thing I need to do is to convince a pre-medical post-baccalaureate program to train me for a PhD program in medical genetics.

Yes. I dare.

Moreover, I even dare to tell the story of my progress.