Wee Beasties!
Bill Nye’s new Netflix series just aired and it’s a lot of fun. He kicked it off by waxing philosophically about science so I’m going to take a few minutes to do the same.
One of the really cool things about science is that sometimes you get to be the first person in the world to know something. Nowadays it’s often something pretty esoteric but still really exciting, especially you’ve spent sweat and hours to get to that discovery. To me, nothing typifies this excitement around discovery more than a story of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology. In the 17th century, Van Leeuwenhoek looked through a microscope at a drop of water and found it teeming with microscopic life. He was the first recorded person in history (that I know of) to see microbes. He called them “wee beasties”. The science has survived and thrived, sadly the quaint term hasn’t.
I always think about what that first day for Van Leeuwenhoek might have been like — to be the only person in the world to know there was so much more under the lens. It must have been exhilarating. And terrifying. To walk down the street and look into another person’s sweaty face and, for the first time, confidently know it was teeming with wee life. I imagine he felt itchy.
As a scientist myself, I’ve got to see some neat things too. During my graduate work in dairy science I got to help take some electron microscope pictures of milk proteins that were pretty incredible and fundamentally changed my understanding of an esoteric concept surrounding milk protein structure. It’s no ‘wee beasties’ but it was still pretty cool. Experimenting with insects has yielded some fascinating results and new flavours and foods I didn’t know existed too. Experiment can take us to the frontier of knowledge — there’s usually some cool stuff there.
