Storytelling in Science

Once upon a time in undergrad, I was sitting in Dr. V’s class on Renaissance literature and culture, watching her breathe life into history. She used literature, architecture, paintings, first hand accounts, to tell a cohesive story that felt deliciously complete. When she described court processions, I was willingly transported and eager for deeper immersion. That’s a scholar, I thought. She brought life to her discipline, and it to her. I wanted that. It was something intimate, something sacred — it was a search for truth. It came with the hope of being able to reconstruct and retell just one tiny story in the history of man. It came with the humility that even with hundreds of artifacts and primary sources, even this one story is difficult to do justice to. And even after a lifetime of searching for answers, a scholar must contend with new evidence, an ever-populating bank of questions, and maybe always wonder, “but what do I really know?”

And in a world of people quick to pat themselves on the back for mundane, inconsequential achievements, there was nothing more appealing to me than this humility.

I went on to realize that people in academia, or really anywhere, who aren’t good at tooting their own horn, don’t get very far in their careers. Arrogance is rewarded. Earth-shattering, larger-than-life conclusions are prized and paraded. And masterful storytelling is not always a product of diligent and honest research.

But I’m here to channel some Dr. V as I craft my M.O. in the realm of scientific research, anyway. Biology is the study of life, it is the study of self. Which questions do I most want answers to? Which stories am I trying to complete? How do I tell a story better the next time?

For the first 20-something years of my life, I dabbled heartily. And mostly happily. But now I’ve planted myself in a discipline, and the name of the game is depth, not breadth. Immersion, observation, a tiny shrapnel of knowledge, the art of storytelling — these are all things I get a taste of along the way to that PhD, and I ought to probably savor them all a little more. But after chasing these abstract goals, and feeling their joys, I’m mostly burdened by the privilege of higher education, by the privilege of this most intimate endeavor to see the naked universe under a microscope, to witness realities that give credence to the stories we tell in science.

My training has given me a bounty of knowledge, and though incomplete, is a toolbox that enables me to ask the right questions, take ownership over my health, and pay closer attention to cues from my body as well as my environment. Everything is a variable, every person is a puzzle to solve, and every problem is a joy to deconstruct. If you could walk a mile with my frame of mind, training, upbringing, and privilege…you, too, would wake up smiling.

So I’ll share a little bit of my story.