Science, Philosophy, and the In-between
I consider this section a space for my philosophical reflections on science and on the stream of thoughts that often pile up in my mind. These ideas may not always be practical or grounded in formal fundamentals, but they represent my genuine feelings toward research, and perhaps toward life itself. Some thoughts may offer new perspectives, while others may echo familiar or imperfect stereotypes. I look forward to sharing them, questioning them, and learning along the way.
A poem I wrote for my favorite TA – Sometime in 2020
I had zero coding experience before entering college, and I struggled quite a bit while learning Python. But I was lucky to have the best teaching assistant guiding us through the course. I quickly fell in love with coding and its fundamentals. As a token of gratitude, I wrote a poem for him and emailed it to him. The poem roughly follows an AABB rhyming couplet scheme, and the highlighted words in the poem are technical Python terms that I learned during the course (although I only remember a few now). So, thank you so much, Ullas. You are truly inspiring, and you showed me what genuine passion for teaching really looks like.
Calling you back with callbacks won’t do,
As I have already used the generators to do,
While unpacking this poem for you,
I would like to slice up as much as I could do.
There you hoisted your regular expression,
And here people started overloading into depression,
By default, the orthogonal object in our brain was dangling,
While you started decorating the map with your assigning.
The keywords made our dictionary blew,
Especially, the lambda which reduced my crew,
Now, at the closure, I have filtered my thought,
Lastly, thanks for the pet duck which looks so hot.
Do we really know what heartbreak is? – Thursday, Feb 12 2026
This is quite random, or perhaps not, but I thought about what an emoji for heartbreak really is. Well, first of all, WhatsApp and my phone show the emoji 💔 when I type “heartbreak”. But when I think about it more carefully, it depicts almost nothing about what heartbreak actually is. Sure, I agree that when you go through an intense heartbreak, sometimes for reasons you understand and sometimes for reasons you don’t, you experience tachycardia as your heart beats faster. So yes, I guess your heart is not behaving normally, and perhaps this emoji, 💔, is trying to communicate that. But mind you, this emoji does little to no justice to what truly goes on when someone undergoes a so-called heartbreak. These are only the symptoms our heart experiences, while our brain is cooked. It is the brain (or shall I say, we) that suffers the most. It is those synaptic junctions that have strengthened their connections so tightly over the past few years – through happiness, sadness, and all kinds of feelings and memories shared with this person who has suddenly gone “missing” over the course of a week, or even less. It is the suffering that appears when you are trying to be productive and happy, and then the smallest, most insignificant moment in your day triggers that synapse and brings back a memory you shared with this person and the realization that they are no longer around. It is that one song that “rings a bell” in the primary auditory cortex. It is the taste of that one dessert (or, unfortunately, sometimes several) that stimulates the primary gustatory cortex. It is that fragrance that “reminds” you of them by wreaking havoc in the primary olfactory cortex. All these regions are in the brain. The suffering and the longing originate in the brain, those annoying, strengthened synaptic junctions. The increase in heart rate, which is perhaps what we/I call heartbreak through that emoji, this one right here 💔, is just one of the consequences. Just like an increase in body temperature, perspiration, or tearing up. But it all stems from the brain.
So how do we make an emoji for that? Well, I gave it a silly try in the image below, showing a poorly drawn brain and a zoomed-in, strengthened synapse getting excited (electricity zapping, and please pardon me for the lack of yellow markers), triggered by the memory of this person. All this to conclude that what this 💔 is trying to communicate has so much more to do with the brain than with the heart. So let’s acknowledge that, and support our peers, because we are, after all, lovely and caring humans. I do want to add a small disclaimer: this writing is not inspired by any particular incident. It is purely a random thought that entered my head after a 5k run.
What is Science to you? – Friday, Jan 27 2026
To some, science is about finding the truth. To others, it is about finding something meaningful. For some, that meaning comes from discovering the very nature of Mother Nature; for others, it comes from finding or building something that can be translated for the benefit of humankind, whether medically (since I am a biologist) or in other fields (engineering, which I really aspire to and only get to do through small projects at home). And for some, it is about engaging a digressive, forever-hungry-for-thoughts brain to be intellectually stimulated and committed to something (a project) for long enough before getting bored and perhaps moving on to the next. But most importantly, I think, a researcher’s perspective on science switches between all of these, at least some of the time.
Although something that I really want to emphasize: I am deeply inspired by science that has no boundaries. Science, in its purest and best form, is the pursuit of knowledge to me. As researchers go through their trajectories, more often than not, they become experts in a particular field, perhaps biochemistry, cell biology, or even a particular protein, maybe ELAC-2 or actin. For me, the passion, the drive, and the excitement come from observations (observations made while working on a biophysics problem, a field in which I am far from even being called a beginner) and from thinking of all the ways to defend or to test the basis of those observations. In that thinking, there are no boundaries, no expertise-driven biases, and no expectations that my model must belong to a particular branch of science.
I wish this beautiful, and perhaps the most powerful, inspiring, and attractive aspect of being a researcher and a thinker could be experienced early in life. The idea that there are no intrinsic boundaries, no intrinsic fear, and no intrinsic biases. We start, and we start now, from scratch. Let’s dig in and see what we find, using whatever approach is best. I often wonder what opportunities during a PhD, or perhaps even earlier, can allow one to truly experience this. I felt something close to this during my Biology of Aging course at MBL, and that feeling was addictive. Is it rewarding? I don’t know yet—but it is certainly deeply satisfying. I am curious about what other ways might exist to cultivate this addiction. Perhaps not only training-focused research courses, since they usually have very small cohort sizes, but maybe even courses on the philosophy of science, the practice of doing science, or reflections on how science is done, courses that could ignite this passion in many early researchers or aspiring ones. Now and then, I feel this again when I come across talks that truly inspire me, research that pushes through boundaries of different fields, research expertise, history, and convention.
As I write this, I realize how abstract this has become. What I am truly trying to communicate is this – as I aspire to become an independent researcher, this feels like a note, or a pep talk, from my inner self. Yes, being a researcher is a job title. Yes, it is how you earn your salary and feed yourself, and perhaps your dependents. But the true nature of science, the pursuit of knowledge, should see no fear, recognize no boundaries, and it exists beyond job descriptions and professional pressures. To discover something, you must do what is needed, be it cell biology, biochemistry, or a method you have only heard about and feel anxious about trying. Just do it. Find someone who does it, and do it, or learn from them and do it.
We, researchers, scientists, thinkers, are learners. The reason I became so interested in science is that I truly enjoy learning: learning the fundamentals of matter, the basics of biology, the gospels of gene regulation, and the interactions between immune cells, and so much more. I am studying genetics and mitochondria, and I am no expert in immunology, neurobiology, or any of the many other biological subfields. But I do not need to be. Not before, not during, or even after! I can just make an observation and ask my question. I can let the question decide what I should learn over the next few years and go from there. That is where the fun is. That is where the satisfaction is. That is what keeps my brain from constantly wandering and becoming too digressive. Limits to papers and recognition are external. They are short-lived and perhaps useful for validation, for reassurance that I am doing good science (though I say this with little experience, so take it at your own risk). As I reflect more on this over the years, I find that, for now at least, I am comfortable living with the uncertainty to use this approach towards the science I want to do. At the end of the day, with a finite lifespan, I can choose to study what I want, with no boundaries, with freedom, and with all the intellectual stimulation I crave. My fear that I might one day need to work part-time simply to support myself (because maybe this approach brings joy but not funding?) may or may not come true. But even then, I hope I will remain occupied with the purest and dreamiest version of performing science – science without boundaries and with an open view of the world.
This is what science means to me today. I cannot promise myself that it will feel the same tomorrow, but today, I feel this strongly.
Am I a Scientist or a Philosopher, or None? – Friday, Dec 19 2025
This morning, I was walking to the lab from my house in the middle of a snowstorm. More than three-fourths of the way through the journey, a random thought originated in my brain, which is not a rare phenomenon. Especially under strange environmental conditions: underwater when I’m out of breath, in the shower when the water is burning hot, or in this case, in a snowstorm with winds that probably froze my brain.
I started thinking about how every person we have interacted with, and every person we have a memory of, has changed the DNA of our cells.
Let me explain this more systematically. I was thinking that if we remember a memory with someone, it’s probably because the neuronal junctions between two cells became more active. Possibly, the levels of neurotransmitter exchange and electrical currents were established and then maintained between those two cells. This must be established either by changes in gene expression, by modulating promoters and hence changing the levels of proteins required to produce these neurotransmitters (something we call epigenetics), or by any other changes required to establish that memory. Or perhaps through post-translational modifications of these proteins.
Neurobiology is not really one of my strengths, but I don’t think anyone’s is strong enough to really comment on this with complete certainty or to disprove this theory. It’s just a beautiful and very new perspective that I acquired. I had never thought about the impact these lovely people around me have on my body, on such a micro scale, on my DNA, perhaps by phosphorylating or dephosphorylating those CpG sites (epigenetics again). I feel so powerful thinking about this. It reminds me of Alexandra Potter’s quote, “We are the sum total of our memories. Memories are the most precious things we have. Good or bad. That’s what makes us who we are“. Today, I see memories as something even more tangible. To me, it is an integration of our CpG sites over all cells for each cell type influenced by people around us.
With this, I want to say that I love these humans, and I love the impact they pose.
The Magic of Dreaming – Wednesday, Oct 15 2025
I felt joy internally but embarrassment externally when someone in the lab said they hoped I’d get a Nature paper out of this idea or observation. I think they were excited for me – or maybe they were being sarcastic, I don’t know. But I was so, so, so excited. Okay, so now I’ve spilled the tea, so you have to listen to the whole story.
Whoops! Got busy, and this is me after 10 days lol. Sorry for getting you riled up, and now I probably only remember 10% of the scenes/drama/dialogues. I’m also going to end this one with a bummer. The moral of this experience was that it’s not that I will find something so fundamental, so novel, so useful for society that it tempts me to do science, but it’s the act itself. It’s the dreaming.
It’s that moment when I see something, when I make an observation, when I think, “What if this is why we see this?” and I propose sometimes clever and mostly stupid ways to test it, I feel joy. And I feel it way before even doing the experiment or testing whether what I proposed is correct or not. As someone wise – or not so wise – said, we suffer more in our imagination than in reality. I want to use the same principle to say that we can enjoy more in our imagination, too. Most of my ideas, perhaps 99.99% of the models I propose, will be wrong (are wrong, or maybe an even greater percentage). Only that 0.01% might lead to a novel, impactful discovery. But I want to promise myself that I will feel joy, and remind myself that I have felt joy in imagining 100% of them.
And that is what matters to me, and this is my story.