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Reading the language
Before I could read a cell, I had to learn to read its name. Latin taught me that every scientific term is an act of naming — and naming is always an act of interpretation. Philosophy taught me to ask what we lose in the translation.
Vita
The first Latin word that stopped me was vita. Life. Four letters. I had been studying it in a laboratory for months before I learned its name. Every organism I researched — the C. elegans that lived longer under dietary restriction, the elderly muscle that lost its vitality — was already speaking Latin. I just hadn't been listening.
The questions the data can't answer
Sartre said existence precedes essence — that nothing has a predetermined nature. Then I spent a year engineering E. coli Nissle 1917, rewriting its genetic code to produce molecules it was never meant to make. I had changed its essence before it existed in its new form. Philosophy gave me the discomfort I needed. Epistemology gave me the harder question: when an experiment fails and I don't know why, what exactly do I know? Science gives methods. Philosophy gives the courage to sit with what the methods cannot resolve.
The selfish gene, revisited
Where words end
There are questions philosophy can frame but not answer.
Music and piano
For those, I sit down at the piano and listen.
Next steps
Ready to see how I think about all of this?