Went to a symposium last night that I had been looking forward to for a long time now. I got to listen to Sydney Brenner talk - again! I heard his Nobel Laureatte speech at Uppsala in 2002 and yesterday I heard him present a talk entitled "Humanity's Genes", in which he spoke of the new genome project.
Sydney Brenner is a great public speaker - he is not only extremely intelligent, but also VERY funny! I loved his Nobel speech and I had to skip a Microbial Genetics prac to listen to it... I told my Microbial Genetics Lecturer (another great but crazy scientist!), that I thought Prof. Brenner was soo humble. My lecturer laughed at me and he said "He is SYDNEY BRENNER!! HE IS NOT HUMBLE!!".
When I heard him talk yesterday, I kept picturing the Swedish Scientist saying "He isn't humble!!". Brenner isn't humble - but he has no reason to be. He has done amazing things for Science and has a lovely way of presenting his ideas and is critical about things most scientists take for granted and gets his views across in a truly charming fashion.
There were a series of talks yesterday - presented by various people I truly look upto in the field. I saw Robin Holliday present for the first time yesterday and while everyone else used flashy powerpoint slides, he used the good old over-head projector! He was like a teddybear and I just wanted to go down and give him a hug! (I didn't offcourse - It would have been a tad odd :P).
It was a great day though - sometimes it is necessary to see the big picture. I am only working on one verrrryyy small protein and as excited as I can get about it, I can't and I don't expect the same amount of excitement from everyone else. When you get bogged down on all the little details of your project like primer design and Mg concentration in a PCR reaction, it is lovely to hear from people who have gone through all that and are now able to look back and see and tell you that that one PCR truly revolutionised the way they saw everything else.
Hearing a few people yesterday, reminded me of why I am doing all this in the first place. Why am I subjecting myself to low pay, long hours, dark labs, tedious experimentation and repeated failures?? As much as I can joke about it being the easiest way to avoid "real life" (although there is a degree of truth to it), there is another reason which I need to be reminded of once in a while.
The reason is simply that I actually do believe in what I am doing and I DO enjoy it!
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