As an undergraduate, I am passionate about many things. I loved interpreting elaborate poems from Francois Villon and reading the beautifully crafted short stories from Ernest Hemingway. I found the biggest national pride when looking at the colorful paintings and cubism elements of Romero Britto. My future goal was to be a writer, I would major in Literature, maybe take a few political science classes, I would write novels using romantic realism. My passion would overcome anything and everything, art is what made me feel things. Art is what made me alive…until I found science.
In my first semester of college, I decided to try to take a few Neuroscience classes. I am not sure why. I had changed my mind about the major I wanted several times. I wanted literature, but also psychology and political science always interested me. However, the summer before my freshman year of college I watched the movie The Theory of Everything, about the life of the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. I found the story interesting and I decided to read some of the books he published. I read Into the Universe and transitioned to A Brief History of Time. I was surprised Hawking communicated in plain English about the universe and science. I finally understood the passion people could feel for science, outside of stacks of flashcards with definitions too dull to enjoy memorizing.
My only science class in my first semester was my Intro to Neuroscience class. We learned about the action potentials of the sodium-potassium pump. We saw (no pun intended) how vision works, gene replication, and even what a G-protein coupled receptor among other things. I was not necessarily passionate about it. I went to lectures, asked questions, read textbook chapters on my pdf of Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain 4th edition (or maybe 3rd). It was fine, not great, but fine nonetheless.
I thought science was not malleable enough. Why did I have to accept that mitochondria were the powerhouse of the cell? In literature I could question the character’s motives, I could read about the author’s life and make inferences of their intended message. I could look at the historical background of specific pieces of art and analyze how it influenced culture or how the political environment influenced that piece. I could do so much with art, but I saw science as a motionless, rigid phenomenon.
My opinion started changing when I saw Santiago Ramón y Cajal drawings of the neuron. That was the first time I saw the connection between science and art. I felt inspired by how Cajal used his artistic abilities to combine two things he felt passionate about into one. His anatomically precise drawings of neurons and the nervous system led to the development of the neuron doctrine, establishing neurons where individual entities that communicated with each other. The work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal inspired me to start drawing the structures I needed to learn for my Neuro class. The drawings served as an outlet for some of my creativity, not all of them were great but they gave me great joy.
That little creative outlet pushed me to continue seeking more creative outlets inside science. That is when I started to learn to code and creating small games and side projects on Python with the library Turtles that excited me. I started noticing the presence of science every where in the media, from books and shows to poetry and TikTok. I began to see art in scientific phenomenons and structures in the body. I could not believe I spent such a long time ignorant to the beauty of how protein models looked with their amino groups, alpha carbon atoms, and carboxyl groups. My final outlet became writing, and I hope to stick to it.
