Five questions
Nov. 12th, 2018 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livThanks to whoever revived the five questions meme. I'm really enjoying lots of the questions and answers. And especial thanks to rushthatspeaks for asking me some really cool questions:
I really like this question, because the answer tells you a lot about me, both my history and my personality. It happened like this: I am the oldest of four close in age siblings. My mother was pregnant three times before I was five, and each time she explained pregnancy to me. She has a biology degree and worked as a research scientist for a while, and doesn't believe in talking down to children, so there was quite a lot of technical detail involved. I got really interested in how the sperm and egg "know" how to grow into a baby (though not so much in how the gametes get together in the first place). And being interested in this led me to seeking out everything I could find about genetics; the 80s and especially the 90s was a good time for this because DNA was cool and there was a lot of popular and child-friendly info out there.
In my teens I became best friends with someone who was equally excited about extremely technical detail about genetics, and we fantasized about growing up to be the next Watson and Crick. Biology through most of school was pretty boring, because there was too little modern molecular stuff for a kid who was already obsessed with the subject. I nearly dropped it at A Level, thinking chemistry was more relevant to my university plans. But school careers advisers (plus a French teacher who bent the rules to let me take French as a fifth subject) convinced me to carry on. And I had a very good teacher for sixth form, someone who really ought to have been a professional biologist but was from the generation when bright women were much more likely to become school teachers than scientists. So from her I started to get an inkling that there was a whole field beyond just "genetics" that included the kind of thing I'm excited about: the molecular explanations for how complex living systems develop and respond. This used to be called cybernetics before computers were cool, now it's pretty much just called molecular biology.
There was a talk which I consider the starting point of my career, which was part of the kind of science festival you get exposed to a lot growing up in Cambridge. That was the first time I heard about the concept of apoptosis. To me that's even more exciting than how a single zygote can turn into a baby, the system which controls whether cells grow, change or die, and all the factors that need to be integrated to get that decision correct. After that, I made university plans based on what was going to have the most cell signalling, and managed to get two summer internships at the Weizmann Institute, the second of them in a major p53 lab, which led to a PhD in another big p53 lab, p53 being one of the really exciting regulators of the cell cycle.
I think a lot of it is the exact time and place I happened to grow up, the real flowering of molecular biology. The human genome was sequenced, and the Nobel prize was awarded for work on cell cycle control just around my graduation. The fact that this stuff is highly relevant to cancer was in some ways a bonus; I was interested in the underlying mechanisms just because they're interesting, but being able to contribute to better cancer treatments gave me both a sense of worthwhileness and plenty of opportunities to pursue my interest.
The other side is that I really like specific details, I've never been a big picture person and found things in the more physics-y direction too abstract. I have a good memory, but I don't like arbitrary memorization, I like learning about how all kinds of tiny parts interact to produce complex outcomes. And early 21st century molecular biology really fits well with that.
2. Heard any good music lately?
So my partners' 6yo is forming independent musical tastes. And sometimes he'll play me something; I think it's mainly because he wants me to watch when he's improvising dances more than because he consciously wants to share music with me, but it's a really nice way to hear some of the music he's found by playing with Spotify and YouTube. The one that's most caught my attention lately is Avicii. He's quite versatile, his songs seem quite different from eachother, and some of them tend more to the over-produced pop than my usual tastes. But he's described as an EDM artist and I can hear that some of his roots are in stuff I'm really into. I'm liking The Nights a lot, and Without you keeps grabbing me though I couldn't exactly describe what I like about it.
3. The place you most want to travel that you've never visited?
This isn't a topic that I think about all that much. I am not extremely interested in travel for its own sake, and I don't really have a bucket list. I would probably say India, but I don't know where in India, I haven't thought about it in enough detail to have a specific location I'm excited to see, I would probably just do a couple of weeks of the obvious tourist sites. My girlfriend wants to go to Darjeeling and I said I'd go with her when we're both at a life stage for random spontaneous travel.
4. Favorite color?
Purple. When I was a child and got asked my favourite colour a lot I had strong views about purple. I imagined that when I grew up I would dress entirely in purple, I would dye my hair and paint my nails and wear loads of purple makeup. And I haven't quite lived up to that, partly because I can't really cope with makeup, but I do wear a lot of purple. And I buy lots of purple objects (I had a purple kettle for a while which made me really really happy), and I usually play as purple in board games.
I like #FF00FF a great deal, but also purples more towards the mauve or even deep pink range. I'm less fond of lilac and very pale purples, but I generally don't prefer pastels.
5. If you could pick up any skill in an instant, what would it be?
I think it would have to be singing. Mostly the idea of picking up a skill in an instant seems slightly disturbing, because I love learning new skills above almost any other pleasure in life, so just instantly being able to do something without any learning seems to miss out on most of the point! But I have spent my whole life being sad about not being able to carry a tune, and trying to improve that skill by practice works to some extent but it gets tangled up in all my difficult feelings about how excluded I have been through not being able to sing, which doesn't help.
I'm happy to provide questions if anyone would like some.
rushthatspeaks for asking me some really cool questions: 1. How did you decide on your scientific field-- what was it that caused you to think oh, this direction?
- How did you decide on your scientific field-- what was it that caused you to think oh, this direction?
- Heard any good music lately?
- The place you most want to travel that you've never visited?
- Favorite color?
- If you could pick up any skill in an instant, what would it be?
I really like this question, because the answer tells you a lot about me, both my history and my personality. It happened like this: I am the oldest of four close in age siblings. My mother was pregnant three times before I was five, and each time she explained pregnancy to me. She has a biology degree and worked as a research scientist for a while, and doesn't believe in talking down to children, so there was quite a lot of technical detail involved. I got really interested in how the sperm and egg "know" how to grow into a baby (though not so much in how the gametes get together in the first place). And being interested in this led me to seeking out everything I could find about genetics; the 80s and especially the 90s was a good time for this because DNA was cool and there was a lot of popular and child-friendly info out there.
In my teens I became best friends with someone who was equally excited about extremely technical detail about genetics, and we fantasized about growing up to be the next Watson and Crick. Biology through most of school was pretty boring, because there was too little modern molecular stuff for a kid who was already obsessed with the subject. I nearly dropped it at A Level, thinking chemistry was more relevant to my university plans. But school careers advisers (plus a French teacher who bent the rules to let me take French as a fifth subject) convinced me to carry on. And I had a very good teacher for sixth form, someone who really ought to have been a professional biologist but was from the generation when bright women were much more likely to become school teachers than scientists. So from her I started to get an inkling that there was a whole field beyond just "genetics" that included the kind of thing I'm excited about: the molecular explanations for how complex living systems develop and respond. This used to be called cybernetics before computers were cool, now it's pretty much just called molecular biology.
There was a talk which I consider the starting point of my career, which was part of the kind of science festival you get exposed to a lot growing up in Cambridge. That was the first time I heard about the concept of apoptosis. To me that's even more exciting than how a single zygote can turn into a baby, the system which controls whether cells grow, change or die, and all the factors that need to be integrated to get that decision correct. After that, I made university plans based on what was going to have the most cell signalling, and managed to get two summer internships at the Weizmann Institute, the second of them in a major p53 lab, which led to a PhD in another big p53 lab, p53 being one of the really exciting regulators of the cell cycle.
I think a lot of it is the exact time and place I happened to grow up, the real flowering of molecular biology. The human genome was sequenced, and the Nobel prize was awarded for work on cell cycle control just around my graduation. The fact that this stuff is highly relevant to cancer was in some ways a bonus; I was interested in the underlying mechanisms just because they're interesting, but being able to contribute to better cancer treatments gave me both a sense of worthwhileness and plenty of opportunities to pursue my interest.
The other side is that I really like specific details, I've never been a big picture person and found things in the more physics-y direction too abstract. I have a good memory, but I don't like arbitrary memorization, I like learning about how all kinds of tiny parts interact to produce complex outcomes. And early 21st century molecular biology really fits well with that.
2. Heard any good music lately?
So my partners' 6yo is forming independent musical tastes. And sometimes he'll play me something; I think it's mainly because he wants me to watch when he's improvising dances more than because he consciously wants to share music with me, but it's a really nice way to hear some of the music he's found by playing with Spotify and YouTube. The one that's most caught my attention lately is Avicii. He's quite versatile, his songs seem quite different from eachother, and some of them tend more to the over-produced pop than my usual tastes. But he's described as an EDM artist and I can hear that some of his roots are in stuff I'm really into. I'm liking The Nights a lot, and Without you keeps grabbing me though I couldn't exactly describe what I like about it.
3. The place you most want to travel that you've never visited?
This isn't a topic that I think about all that much. I am not extremely interested in travel for its own sake, and I don't really have a bucket list. I would probably say India, but I don't know where in India, I haven't thought about it in enough detail to have a specific location I'm excited to see, I would probably just do a couple of weeks of the obvious tourist sites. My girlfriend wants to go to Darjeeling and I said I'd go with her when we're both at a life stage for random spontaneous travel.
4. Favorite color?
Purple. When I was a child and got asked my favourite colour a lot I had strong views about purple. I imagined that when I grew up I would dress entirely in purple, I would dye my hair and paint my nails and wear loads of purple makeup. And I haven't quite lived up to that, partly because I can't really cope with makeup, but I do wear a lot of purple. And I buy lots of purple objects (I had a purple kettle for a while which made me really really happy), and I usually play as purple in board games.
I like #FF00FF a great deal, but also purples more towards the mauve or even deep pink range. I'm less fond of lilac and very pale purples, but I generally don't prefer pastels.
5. If you could pick up any skill in an instant, what would it be?
I think it would have to be singing. Mostly the idea of picking up a skill in an instant seems slightly disturbing, because I love learning new skills above almost any other pleasure in life, so just instantly being able to do something without any learning seems to miss out on most of the point! But I have spent my whole life being sad about not being able to carry a tune, and trying to improve that skill by practice works to some extent but it gets tangled up in all my difficult feelings about how excluded I have been through not being able to sing, which doesn't help.
I'm happy to provide questions if anyone would like some.
