Myself, I always think of Biology as nothing more than a bunch of awesome genetic mutations. I really like the idea of what we can do with DNA. I don’t care what double helical chains are and for that matter I don’t even bother with hearing the long complicated explanations the biologists give about how the DNA has evolved or its importance, probably because for much of my life, my philosophy has been that what you can’t see doesn’t really matter. But what I do care about is what we can do with it. Every time I get a cool idea, Biology seems to make it even cooler.
What if, someday, we could fill chlorophyll in human hair? Now, how cool would that be? Seriously, you don’t have to eat, and it’s almost perfect - you make your own food, so it should do away with the hoo-ha on energy crisis. Plus, at night, since you’re going to be sleeping anyway, you wouldn’t need to make your own food (or you’d get really really fat, and that’s just not good at all). Why hair? I don’t know but I’ve never thought about having green-colored skin because I really like the human race with its current complexion set.
You know what would also be really cool? If we could make X-Ray eyes with a really powerful zoom lens (really powerful ones) and then we don’t have to get off our asses to go look at anything at all! Just look through a couple of hundred walls or so and bam! You’re looking at what you want exactly how you want to see it.
But most of all, I want super powers, and I think the ultimate superpower is the power to fly. It would just be so great: you get up and you don’t want to drive so you say, ‘I’ll take the shorter route, I’ll fly my way to work today’. Plus how romantic would it be: you’re on a date and rather than sitting it out in a crappy restaurant, you get something nice to drink and go fly over the clouds with your date.
The point I want to get at is how much fun Biology could be. But all people do are boring things. And I know there’s going to be a lot of excuses - we have to do this before we do that - but I just feel people are prejudiced by religion, ethics and whatnot into not going down these paths for pure scientific curiosity. I’m just hopeful my friends turn out to be better and more interesting biologists then the current lot.
Haris