I should have known my trip was doomed when we decided to go to the other place, Oxford. Nothing good ever happens when Cambridge students cross enemy lines.

There were three of us from Cambridge and two from Kukuland, otherwise known as America, land of lawsuits and compulsive Googling. The cast included an Organizer who planned bathroom breaks like military operations, a Driver who treated petrol prices as moral philosophy, and the Politician, a student union hopeful who could turn a traffic jam into a campaign rally.

The Politician's worldview could be summed up in one line: "Never waste a potential crisis." So naturally, when our beloved friend, the one everyone quietly treats like a rare and delicate species (which, in this case, happened to be me), popped a mysterious berry into her mouth, it wasn't biology that took over. It was politics.

In ancient India, Chanakya outlined four strategies for governance: Saam (persuasion), Daam (incentive), Dand (punishment), and Bhed (division). The Politician, of course, deployed them all. Who knew millennia-old statecraft could resurface in a Fiat heading toward A&E at 4 p.m. on a Saturday?

SAAM (Persuasion): Minutes 1-8

"Just Google it," one of the Kukuland visitors said, already typing. Within thirty seconds, we had three browser tabs open, two Reddit threads, and one ChatGPT prompt: "I may have eaten a yew berry, how long until" The answer, delivered with the clinical confidence only an AI can muster, was clear: cardiac arrest in twenty-five minutes.

I'll admit, I wasn't entirely sure I'd swallowed the berry. I might have just tasted it. But the part of me that grew up in the digital age started mentally Googling "how to write a will on your phone." "Let's just call 111," I suggested. The Politician looked at me with the patience of someone addressing a child. "There's no time for that. ChatGPT said twenty-five minutes." "ChatGPT also thinks I'm a 45-year-old man named Derek when I ask it to write my essays," I replied.

DAAM (Incentive): Minutes 9-35

The Politician pivoted seamlessly. He phoned the Safety Consultant, his best friend back in Cambridge, a man whose entire personality revolves around risk assessment, who once walked into a lamppost while explaining "situational awareness." He speaks in liability thresholds and compliance matrices, as if human emotion were a health and safety violation. "Yew berries?" the Safety Consultant said. "Taxus baccata. Cardiotoxic alkaloids. You need to get to A&E immediately. Every minute counts." "I feel fine," I repeated. "Subjective reporting is unreliable in toxicological emergencies," he replied.

DAND (Punishment): Minutes 36-75

We hit another traffic jam near Kidlington. The GPS recalculated: "Estimated arrival: 68 minutes." I was still fine. More than fine, actually. I was starting to get hungry. "Can we stop for food?" I asked. The Politician turned around. "Are you serious?" "I might be dying. I want chips." "This is exactly the kind of irrational thinking that proves you need medical attention," he said.

BHED (Division): Minutes 76-120

By now, the group had fractured. The Organizer clearly thought I was probably fine but didn't want to be the one who said it. The Driver was focused on fuel efficiency. The Kukuland visitors were torn between concern and the growing suspicion that this was all very silly. "It's been 7,200 seconds," I said. We finally pulled into the hospital car park two hours after I'd eaten the berry. I was still breathing. Still hungry. Still wondering if this qualified as kidnapping.

Epilogue: The Hospital

The nurse blinked at us. "A yew berry?" "Yes," the Politician said immediately, stepping forward. "She consumed it approximately two hours ago. ChatGPT indicated cardiac arrest within twenty-five minutes." The nurse looked at me. "How do you feel?" "Fine," I said. "Hungry." "You mean the ones people make jam with?" The Politician tried one last gambit. "Isn't it negligent to discharge her without observation?" The nurse's smile faded. "She's free to go."

We drove back to Cambridge in silence. And me? I sat in the back, alive and completely fine, wondering how five intelligent people had collectively convinced themselves that a berry, a berry I probably didn't even swallow, was a medical emergency worth a two-hour pilgrimage to Oxford A&E.

Maybe Chanakya was right. Persuasion, incentive, punishment, division. The Politician had run through them all, and every single one had worked exactly as designed. Just not on the berry. On us.

Later, the Kukuland visitors reverse-image-searched the berry. It was a cranberry.

The university likes to present itself as a home of ideas, but it is also an institution of accounts. We like to imagine them as places of ideas and inquiry and patient thought. But underneath all of that, whether you are an academic or someone managing a department, there are cost sheets, grant applications, overheads, and cross-subsidies. Money does not just support the university; it shapes what the university can be.

That becomes especially clear when you think about the difference between STEM and the humanities. Science and engineering departments often have access to larger grants, more funding bodies, and more visibly expensive forms of research. They need laboratories, equipment, technical staff, and infrastructure. The humanities usually do not. But that does not mean they matter less. It may simply mean that the value they produce is harder to measure in financial terms. And that is part of the problem. A university should not only reward the parts of itself that generate the most income. If it does that, it stops being a university in the fullest sense and becomes something narrower, more efficient perhaps, but also more reduced.

What stayed with me, and what I think about this question even more, was visiting David Foster Wallace's lecture. There was something almost aerial about it, as if the moment lifted the whole argument out of the ordinary scale of university life and made it feel larger, more exposed and more morally serious. Wallace's presence seems to hover over these questions of education, attention, and what it means to think well. It made me feel that universities are not just places where knowledge is produced, but places where people are supposed to become more awake to the world and to themselves.

That is why the humanities cannot be dismissed as decorative or secondary. Literature, history, and philosophy do not always produce inventions or cures, but they ask questions that are no less urgent: What kind of life is worth living? What kind of society are we building? What does it mean to pay attention to another person's suffering, or to power, or to truth? A society can be technologically advanced and still morally thin. In that sense, the humanities are not an accessory to the real work. They are part of the real work.

Cambridge is useful here because it embodies this tension. It is a place where science and the humanities exist side by side under the same institutional name, and that matters. It suggests that even a university deeply driven by research income still understands that not everything valuable can be reduced to grant capture or economic output. Some disciplines sustain the institution not because they bring in the most money, but because they protect its breadth, its seriousness, and its claim to educate human beings rather than simply train workers.

As I prepare for the upcoming academic term, and with it a growing sense of mentorship and teaching responsibility, I have become more aware of the importance of transparency in academic relationships. When students choose advisors, begin PhD projects, or seek guidance, they are not only choosing expertise; they are also choosing a set of values, habits, and expectations.

The deeper question is why academics should feel an imperative to articulate and share their personal philosophy at all. Part of the answer is that academia, at its best, is not about accumulation or dominance but about the free exchange of ideas among equals. Yet this ideal is often obscured by the realities of hierarchy, particularly in tenure-track systems, postdoctoral positions, and PhD supervision, where power is unevenly distributed.

Kierkegaard captures something essential when he writes that every human being has a natural need to form a conception of life and its purpose. Without that inward work, people can drift into conformity or simply absorb the values of the surrounding system without question. Academics should resist that drift. They should not only teach content but also model a coherent way of thinking, one that is honest about its assumptions and serious about its responsibilities.

There are several reasons why this matters. It creates transparency, allowing students to understand the basis of a teacher's practice. It helps students make informed choices. It encourages critical thinking about values. It shows that academics are not neutral machines of knowledge production but human beings navigating ethics, judgment, and responsibility.

This is in keeping with the Socratic tradition, which treats learning as dialogue rather than transmission from above. For these reasons, academic institutions should encourage scholars to define and share their personal values more openly, perhaps through an annual workshop in which staff reflect on their teaching philosophy and consider how their values shape their academic practice.

The most important thing I have learned about doing a PhD is that the process is not linear. It does not begin with a question and end with an answer. It begins with a vague interest, runs into walls, doubles back, and eventually settles into something that might generously be called a direction.

There are things I wish I had known earlier. I wish I had understood sooner that struggling with a problem for weeks without progress is not a sign of failure but often a sign of genuine engagement. The instinct to abandon a difficult question and find something more tractable is almost always the wrong one.

I also wish I had taken supervision more seriously as a relationship rather than a transaction. Supervisors are not there to give you answers; they are there to help you think. The best conversations I had with my supervisors were the ones where I came in confused and left more confused, but in a more productive direction.

Reading widely helped enormously. The papers directly relevant to my thesis were important, but the ones that changed how I thought were often from adjacent fields: biophysics papers that illuminated my biochemistry, philosophy of science pieces that changed how I framed my questions, historical accounts of how certain discoveries were actually made.

Writing early and often also mattered more than I expected. Writing is not the product of thinking; it is part of the process. The moment you try to put an idea into a sentence, its weaknesses become visible.

Finally: protect your curiosity. It is possible to become so focused on completing experiments and hitting milestones that you lose sight of why you started. The PhD is long. But the thing that will carry you through is still the original question.

Looking back, my time in venture capital and startups did not pull me away from academia so much as prepare me to return to it with greater clarity. It gave me perspective, discipline, and a deeper understanding of the kinds of problems I wanted to spend my life thinking about.

Four years ago, I faced the difficult task of choosing a PhD program without yet having complete confidence in my own intellectual direction. I eventually chose Stanford, drawn by the opportunity to work with scientists such as Manu Prakash, Daniel Herschlag, and Michael Levitt. But after two years in medical school, I realised that my real interest was not in healthcare as a profession, but in the deeper systems that shape it: design, access, affordability, policy, and distribution. That realization led me to travel to Nigeria, Ghana, and India, where I saw firsthand the consequences of unequal access to care. Many of the barriers were not purely scientific, but structural. Money, incentives, and regulation were often the real bottlenecks.

Working in VC and startups gave me a valuable education in a different kind of seriousness. I learned how quickly ideas are filtered through hierarchy, urgency, and the pressure of financial return. I also learned that in industry, people often move rapidly toward solutions before fully understanding the problem. It made me more committed to asking deeper questions.

The experience also gave me a broader network, financial stability, and an industry-aware mindset I now bring to academia. Most importantly, it helped me understand that wanting to do a PhD is not just an intellectual decision but a personal one. It took time for me to recognise that my real attachment was to research, inquiry, and teaching. The PhD was not a detour from my interests but the place where those interests could be pursued more deeply and honestly.

It only occurred to me today, on January 18th, that there is real value in working on multiple unrelated papers, blog posts, and thought pieces at the same time. While I was working on my blog post about symmetry in biology, I came across More is Different by P. W. Anderson, and it immediately connected with several other pieces I had been developing. What I found striking was that a paper rooted in one topic could open up links across so many others. Science is not only about specialisation; it is also about discovering how apparently separate questions speak to one another.

This also reminded me of Einstein's letter, Something Like My Own Obituary, where he speaks of a free-flowing mind, unrestrained by confinement. A scientific life should allow space for rumination, for thought that is not forced into immediate usefulness.

Then, on January 19th, while reading Jacob Monod's book, I found that even the very first page generated ideas for an unrelated paper I was writing on natural design. Monod, even while working within biochemistry, was clearly able to reach toward ideas that resonate across philosophy, biology, and broader questions of meaning.

By January 22nd, while working on my essay Truth as I See It, I started thinking about how Godel's incompleteness theorem relates to the halting problem and the universal Turing machine. This opened new possibilities for my essay on why paradoxes may lie at the heart of science.

What all of this suggests is that thought does not always progress in a straight line. Sometimes the richest understanding comes from letting different projects speak to one another. One paper illuminates another. One book opens a path into a different question. And in that crossing of boundaries, science becomes not less rigorous, but more alive.

Churning out ideas feels strangely brutal when we demand that they be truly original. The bar is set at revelation: prove you are worthy of the muse. Meanwhile, most of us know, quietly, that we could be more creative than we are currently allowing ourselves to be.

I have been sitting. Nothing is squeezing out. So I keep returning to a softer, less glamorous question: how does anyone actually come up with an idea that feels like it is truly theirs, stitched from the fabric of their own life and not borrowed from someone else's?

Part of the cruelty is how we tell the stories later. We talk about Slack as if it appeared fully formed, not as the chat system inside a failing game that had to die first. We inherit the clean before/after arc and never get to see the long, private middle where nothing quite works and every idea feels slightly off, slightly embarrassing, not yet worthy of being told.

When I think back to my own thesis, my favourite pages were not the ones with the polished figures and tidy conclusions. It was the future directions section, the only part that openly admitted: this is not finished, and that is the point.

Lately, I have been trying to treat ideas less like bolts from the blue and more like small pivots around the things I already love. In experimental work, problems appear as stubborn, everyday difficulties: a reaction that will not run, a signal that keeps disappearing into noise. The way through is not to conjure a brand new universe, but to be honest about where you do not know what you are doing, and work from there.

Maybe truly original is the wrong god to worship. The work that moves me most never feels like it fell from the sky. It feels like someone has been paying tender, sustained attention for a very long time, precise about what feels alive and what feels dead, noticing small asymmetries and lingering there long enough to say something only that person could say.

Today it occurred to me that creativity may have less to do with the final outcome of a piece of work than with the process by which it comes into being. We often speak of creativity as if it were a property of the finished product: an idea is either original or it is not. But that feels too narrow.

This became especially clear to me while working on my PhD topic at Cambridge. For a time, I felt alone in the process of thinking through the questions surrounding what my protein was doing. There was something both isolating and exciting about that. The idea felt creative, like something I had arrived at myself rather than something borrowed from elsewhere.

Then, when I came to the conference, I realised that other people had been thinking about these questions for years. In one sense, that could have made my idea seem less original. But it did not really change the feeling I had had while developing it. I had reached it independently. I had thought through it, wrestled with it, and encountered it as a genuine discovery in my own intellectual life. That process was creative, even if the final outcome was not especially novel in the strict academic sense.

This distinction matters because we often judge creativity too harshly. Many meaningful ideas are rediscoveries, reinventions, or re-approaches. What makes them creative is not simply that they are unprecedented, but that they are alive in the mind of the person who is thinking them.

Creativity should perhaps be understood less as a final label and more as an activity: entering into a problem, following it honestly, and allowing thought to move through uncertainty toward some form of insight. The result may be modest or already known to others. But if it was thought through independently, the process itself was real, and that realness is part of what creativity means.

When I first read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill and The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels together, I felt the tension between them not just as a theoretical clash, but as a genuine question about how I want to live. Mill speaks to me as someone who wants to think freely, to follow my own path, and to believe that my choices matter. Marx and Engels speak to me as someone who sees real inequality, real suffering, and real structures that trap people. Both are urgent. Both feel true in different ways.

What stands out to me in Mill is his insistence that true liberty is not just the absence of restriction, but the freedom to become someone. He writes that each person becomes more valuable to themselves when they are free, and that this makes them more valuable to others. That idea resonates with me because I have experienced moments where being allowed to think and choose freely changed the quality of my own life. When I was working in venture capital and startups, I saw how much power structure, money, and hierarchy can shape what people do. Mill's idea of individuality is not just about selfishness; it is about the capacity to grow into a person who can contribute something real.

Marx and Engels, on the other hand, speak to my awareness of how systems can crush people. In my travels to Nigeria, Ghana, and India, I saw how money and policy can block access to basic things like healthcare. When Marx writes that the proletariat becomes enslaved to machines and to the need for survival, I understand that not as abstract theory, but as something I have witnessed. Individualism, in that context, can feel like a luxury that only the powerful can afford.

Reading these two texts together has made me think about what kind of freedom I actually want. I do not want a society where everyone is forced into the same mold, where conformity is the only way to survive. But I also do not want a society where liberty becomes a mask for inequality. Mill's picture of a world where everyone can grow and help each other is beautiful, but it is not always realistic. The rich can become richer because they have resources to invest in their own growth. The poor may not have the same resources.

That is why I find myself drawn to a balance between the two. I want a society where people are free to be individuals, to think, to create, to choose, but where that freedom does not come at the cost of justice. I want a society where individuality is not just for the privileged, but for everyone.

In that balance, I see a kind of truth. Liberty is not just the absence of restriction. Justice is not just the absence of inequality. They are both part of the same project: helping people become more fully human. Mill gives me the vision of individual growth. Marx and Engels give me the vision of shared responsibility. I do not want to abandon either. Mill and Marx are not enemies to me. They are two voices in the same conversation, and I am trying to listen to both.

The understanding of truth goes beyond any one individual or perspective. In our search for truth, we encounter many viewpoints, including those shaped by Christian belief and those shaped by secular thought. Each can illuminate something important, but neither can claim to possess the whole of truth in a simple or effortless way.

Francis Schaeffer's idea of "true truth" is useful here because it insists that truth is not merely what feels true to us or what appears true from one point of view. Truth is not a spectrum of personal impressions. It is either true or false. In that sense, truth is unitary and universal, even if our access to it is limited.

Schaeffer also reminds us that human beings are finite. Our understanding is shaped by our background, our assumptions, and our intellectual habits. We do not approach truth from nowhere. We approach it as conditioned, historical, and often self-protective beings. That is why Schaeffer criticizes humanism when it places the human self at the center of all meaning. If human beings become the measure of everything, then truth risks being reduced to opinion, preference, or cultural fashion.

For Schaeffer, truth must be grounded beyond the self, and ultimately beyond human construction. That does not mean reason is unimportant. On the contrary, reason is essential. But reason alone is not the whole story. Schaeffer argues that spiritual truth involves both thought and revelation: we can reason toward God, but we do not master God by reason alone. There must also be openness, humility, and the possibility of being addressed by something greater than ourselves.

Wittgenstein's reflections on relativism support this concern in a different way. If people cannot distinguish between thinking they are right and actually being right, then truth becomes weakly defined and intellectually serious disagreement becomes impossible. The value of Schaeffer's idea is that it resists this fragmentation. It asks us to see truth as whole, not broken into isolated pieces. If truth is real, then it must be larger than any one of us, and the task of human beings is not to invent it, but to receive it with honesty.

Truth is more than just a concept; it is a fundamental cornerstone of our existence. It is unyielding, absolute, and cannot be disputed. It does not matter who perceives it, how they perceive it, when they perceive it, or why. The truth cannot be dependent on context because if it is, it ceases to be absolute. Conversely, if truth exists, the untruth, which is everything but the truth, must also exist.

The example of people touching an elephant perfectly illustrates the significance of relativistic and absolute truth. Regardless of where people touch the elephant, it remains the same. Perhaps the perception of the people touching it would have changed, but the truth, which in this case is the elephant in the room, should remain true and not go against the laws of logic because it does exist according to the rules of the system. But the truth that the elephant exists inside the room cannot be explained by the system itself, but with something outside the system: that is God.

Godel's incompleteness theorem posits that no statement can prove itself. You can draw a circle around it, but it cannot explain anything without referring to something outside the circle. The message of God through the Bible proves logical consistency while being coherent with the theory of everything as Godel calls it. The Bible by itself cannot refer to the truth in it, but it refers to an omnipresent and sovereign God that delivers the message of truth.

The laws of logic, such as the law of identity, the law of noncontradiction, and the law of excluded middle, validate the existence of an absolute truth. If there is no absolute truth, then the existence of an absolute truth cannot be denied. Hence there is an absolute truth, which is the existence of the reality of God.

Many scientists have searched for the idea of truth, including Einstein, who wrote an obituary for himself on his search for truth at the age of 65. As Blaise Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. We know the truth not only by reason but by the heart." It is when we open our hearts to God that we understand the reality of the truth.

As Cicero said in his philosophical dialogue, Hortensius, happiness is not found in physical pleasures but in a dedication of the mind to the discovery of truth. And as Jesus claims, "The truth will set you free." The truth is not just an intellectual pursuit; it is an emotional one as well. A Christian ought to live their faith by demonstrating both intellectually and practically through a life of faith.

We live our lives on a fundamental assumption: our intentions drive our actions. If I want to move my hand, I consciously decide to do it, and then my hand moves. This sense of agency is the bedrock of how we operate. It is the foundation of moral responsibility, of building character, and of shaping our own destiny.

But I recently came across Benjamin Libet's experiment, a famous neurological study that fundamentally challenges this comforting assumption. Libet demonstrated that the neural preparation for a simple human hand gesture occurs milliseconds before the person is actually conscious of making the decision to move. In other words, the brain has already initiated the action before the "I" inside the mind realises a choice has been made. It suggests that some actions are not connected to our conscious will at all; rather, the conscious mind is just playing catch-up, taking credit for a decision the brain has already executed.

When I think about this, I realise how much it disrupts my understanding of agency. In my own life, whether I am thinking about the structural bottlenecks of healthcare, the flow of capital in the startup world, or the transition back to a PhD, I am constantly observing how people make choices. I have always believed that our ability to find novel ways to understand and manipulate complex systems relies on our own conscious agency. If Libet is right, then what exactly is the "self"? Are we just observers trapped in our own bodies, watching our lives play out?

Fortunately, the finality of Libet's conclusion is heavily disputed. Many neuroscientists now agree there is no conclusive evidence that the action truly occurs outside of our free will. Some argue that the brain signals Libet measured were simply background noise, or an unlearned memory response, an automatic readiness rather than a definitive, unchangeable decision.

Yet, even with these scientific disputes, the experiment stays with me. It serves as a profound reminder that the human mind is a complex, layered system. It forces me to ask where our thoughts actually come from before they cross the threshold into action. Even if we do have free will, Libet's experiment shows that the boundary between our conscious intentions and our physical reality is far more mysterious and far less straightforward than we like to believe.

Diving into the deep sea is like exploring outer space; it is full of unknowns. In the depths of the ocean, there is darkness, but it is also teeming with life. How do deep-sea animals generate light to see their surroundings and capture prey? One fascinating adaptation is bioluminescence. Among the most remarkable creatures capable of this are the siphonophores, gelatinous colonial organisms that have captivated the scientific community and ocean enthusiasts alike.

Often mistaken for jellyfish, siphonophores are members of the phylum Cnidaria. Unlike their solitary counterparts, siphonophores are colonial organisms consisting of specialised units known as zooids. Each zooid performs a specific function, such as propulsion, feeding, reproduction, or defence. Together, these zooids work harmoniously, forming an intricate network that allows siphonophores to navigate and survive in the deep-sea environment. In the depths where sunlight barely penetrates, siphonophores have evolved bioluminescence that serves multiple purposes: communication, attracting prey, and attracting mates.

Fragile and dwelling in inhospitable conditions, details of their genetic makeup and biochemistry have remained elusive to scientists for a long time. However, recent advancements, such as remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs), have provided invaluable insights. One such discovery occurred when an ROV deployed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in 2005 explored the dark depths 4,000 metres beneath the sea surface and encountered a rainbow of siphonophores in Monterey Bay.

Siphonophores employ long, slender tentacles armed with venomous cells to efficiently capture prey. Some species have tentacles that extend for several metres, maximising their reach in the nutrient-scarce deep-sea environment. Researchers at MBARI have a dedicated team working towards identifying and studying siphonophores and the nature of bioluminescence in them. Since the discovery of siphonophores in 1785 and many expeditions to explore samples from the deep sea, many secrets still remain.

There is something deeply compelling about studying life at its simplest levels. One of the properties of life itself is that it becomes difficult to describe what emerges when cells begin to interact. A single cell can already be astonishing in its behaviour, but when we move beyond the cell and begin to consider the relationships between cells, new properties appear, properties that cannot be fully explained by looking at the parts alone. Life, in that sense, is not only built from cells; it is also made from interactions, responses, and patterns that emerge between them.

This is why lower organisms are so fascinating. They may be simple in structure, but they often reveal some of the most profound questions in biology. Stentor, for example, is a unicellular organism that has attracted attention because of its unusual and beautiful form of habituation. It responds to repeated stimulation in ways that suggest a kind of learning or adaptation. Studying Stentor matters because it opens up questions about sensory response, environmental interaction, and the basic mechanisms by which living systems adjust to the world around them.

Herbert Spencer Jennings was among the first to describe such phenomena in lower organisms. In his work on the behaviour of lower organisms, he observed that unicellular life could display habituation-like responses to external stimuli. That insight was important because it challenged the assumption that behaviour, adaptation, or responsiveness belonged only to more complex organisms.

My own fascination with this area comes from following the work of scientists such as Manu Prakash, Wallace Marshall, and Alexander Jennings, whose studies of lower organisms show how much can be learned by looking carefully at what is small, ancient, and apparently simple. I am especially drawn to the origin of fluorescence in marine organisms, because it reveals how biological function can become visually striking, almost artistic, while still raising deep scientific questions.

What makes the study of lower organisms so important, then, is not simply that they are interesting in themselves, though they are. It is that they reveal something fundamental about life, emergence, and the relation between structure and behaviour. They remind us that complexity does not always begin with complexity. Sometimes it begins with simplicity.

I have always found Agrobacterium tumefaciens fascinating because it seems to show that nature itself has already invented a kind of genetic engineering. This soil bacterium is famous for its ability to infect plants and induce tumours, but what is most remarkable is the mechanism behind it. Rather than simply harming the plant, Agrobacterium transfers a specific piece of its own DNA into the host nucleus, where it becomes part of the plant's genetic machinery.

What makes this even more interesting is that scientists have learned to take advantage of this natural process. In plant transformation experiments, the tumour-inducing genes inside the transferred region can be removed without preventing DNA transfer. This means the bacterium's delivery system can be preserved while the disease-causing part is disabled. The result is a disarmed but highly effective vehicle for introducing new genetic material into plants.

In my own experiments, I worked with a plasmid called p19MBsK0, and I was struck by how elegantly the system works. The p19 component suppresses the plant's natural RNA silencing defence by binding small interfering RNAs and preventing them from triggering degradation. In effect, p19 helps silence the silencers.

The Vir proteins, especially VirA, VirG, VirD2, and VirE, form a coordinated delivery machinery that responds to plant signals, processes the T-DNA, and escorts it into the plant cell and then into the nucleus. The bacterium is not randomly invading; it is responding to the plant environment with astonishing precision.

That is why Agrobacterium feels to me like one of the most remarkable examples of biology's inventiveness. It shows how living systems can evolve mechanisms so sophisticated that they can later be repurposed for research and biotechnology. What begins as parasitism can become a tool.

Science, at its deepest level, is not only a method of control or explanation, but an act of attentive listening to creation, and many great scientists have understood discovery as something close to reverence, even prayer.

For the modern mind, science is often imagined as conquest: a forceful interrogation of the physical world, a way of mastering nature through observation and experiment. But for many of history's greatest thinkers, the pursuit of truth looked less like domination and more like dialogue. Nature was not a silent object to be conquered, but a responsive reality that yielded its secrets to those who approached it with humility.

Michael Faraday treated the natural world with profound respect, believing that it must be handled with reverence. John Goodenough expressed a similar sense that the scientist is not merely a controller of matter, but someone engaged in an ongoing conversation with the created order. Barbara McClintock spoke of a "feeling for the organism," and Linus Pauling was willing to generate many ideas and let nature reject what was false. Science, at its best, is patient, receptive, and open to correction.

For some scientists, this openness becomes explicitly theological. Srinivasa Ramanujan attributed his mathematical insight to the Goddess Namagiri and spoke of equations as if they were thoughts of God. Johannes Kepler saw the cosmos, human life, and divine order as parts of a single harmonic unity, and described his work as thinking God's thoughts after Him. Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, through the idea of synchronicity, suggested that reality may be structured not only by cause and effect, but also by deeper patterns of meaning.

This is where art becomes a useful parallel. Andrei Tarkovsky once suggested that art is a form of prayer, a way of relating to the Supreme Creator. Science can be understood in a similar way. If Christians believe that the flowers of the field and the birds of the air reveal something of God's character, then studying them is not merely technical labour. It becomes a form of contemplation.

Seen this way, scientific discovery is not simply something we do to the world. It is something the world discloses to us when we are attentive enough to receive it. The scientist is not just an analyst, but also a listener. And if the universe is meaningful, then discovery may be less like conquest than revelation.

As a scientist, I have learned to grow in knowledge, insight and understanding of my field. But as a Christian, I have also learned that the fear of God is the beginning of knowledge. Fear of God is the submission to Him with awe. Without the fear of God, we lack knowledge, understanding and insight.

But what is wisdom, knowledge and insight? The modern explanation of knowledge is the familiarity with a situation or fact; wisdom is using knowledge with good judgment; insight is to understand the hidden nature of something. God says in the beginning of Proverbs: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction." Wisdom comes from listening and growing in learning, but the fear of God is the beginning of knowledge.

As Paul says, God's knowledge is unfathomably deep, requiring wisdom to understand the depth of insight. He knows things at a macro level and also deeper, at a micro level. He knows our past, present and future. In God is "hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3).

I am moved by the beauty and origin of colour, the simplicity of life origins imprinted in the complexity of biomolecules, the unpredictability of biomolecules, and the design of life that is perfect but also hard to describe perfectly. I pray with the fear of God that there is growth in knowledge, wisdom, and insight of creation, just as Cantor, a deeply pious man, was moved by God while building set theory. I believe that my innermost soul can also be moved by God in my scientific pursuits, and I strive to use my knowledge and skills to bring glory to Him.

As scientists, I believe in the mystery of nature and what it has to offer. But I also believe that the key to unravelling this mystery is in prayer. I strive to teach myself to understand at a deep level, both at a macro and micro level, to be Christ-like in my scientific pursuits. As Proverbs 13:20 says, whoever walks with the wise becomes wise.

Mona and Jenka were sisters separated by fifteen years, which meant they had not inherited the same parents so much as different versions of them. One had known their father in his youth and force, the other in his later, softer years. But illness has a way of collapsing time. In the end, they were simply daughters together, standing at the edge of a life that was withdrawing.

Their mother had been fading for some time, her dementia slowly unfastening her from the world. Memory had become porous. Names drifted loose. The ordinary sequence of things no longer held. Their father, meanwhile, was diminishing in another way, not by forgetting, but by despair. When his leg was amputated, he said, "I am no man without a leg." It was a sentence full of more than injury. In it was humiliation, grief, and the terrible collapse of a self he no longer recognised. After that, something in him gave way. His mind darkened. He spoke often of wanting to die, as if he had already begun to understand himself as a burden, as someone whose use in the world had come to an end.

Mona, in England, could see this happening. She watched her father's spirit narrowing around his pain, watched the house become crowded with sorrow: a mother disappearing into dementia, a father withdrawing into hopelessness. She called Jenka, who was in Germany, and said they should go. Not later, not when things were calmer, but now. So the two sisters came with their husbands and children, eight of them in all, packed into a car and carrying with them the sudden warmth and noise of family life.

When they arrived, their father brightened in a way that startled them. It was not a miraculous recovery, nothing so simple, but something unmistakable: a lifting, a return, however brief, of pleasure. He was happy to see them. Genuinely, boyishly happy. That afternoon he asked if they might go for a walk and stop for his favourite beer. So they did. They walked together, all of them, through the ordinary light of the day, and later, in the evening, they went out again. There was no ceremony to it, no declaration that this would be the last time. Only the soft fullness of a day briefly restored to itself.

At ten o'clock that night, he died.

And what remains is the shape of that final day, almost unbearable in its tenderness. The walk. The beer. The family gathered around him. The sudden return of delight to a man who had almost finished with the world. It is hard not to feel that he had been waiting, not in some grand, dramatic sense, but quietly, stubbornly, for one more afternoon of love, one more glimpse of all of them together, before allowing himself to leave. Death came that night, but it did not erase the grace of what came just before it. If anything, it made it shine more brightly: that for a few hours, he was not only dying. He was still a father, still among his people, still glad.

Mona and Jenka were fifteen years apart, and from the beginning that distance seemed to carry more than time. It held different childhoods, different arrangements of affection, different versions of what it meant to belong to the same mother.

Their mother had always wanted a son. This fact, though perhaps not always spoken aloud, lived in the house like a hidden draft: invisible, but felt. Such longings do not always vanish when daughters are born. Sometimes they settle into the fabric of family life, becoming a quiet source of preference, disappointment, or restraint. For the older daughter especially, there was a sense that she had never been fully welcomed in the way she should have been. Her mother was not kind to her, not always cruel in any obvious way, but withheld, distant, difficult to please. The wound of that kind of love is subtle. It does not leave bruises one can point to. It leaves questions. It leaves a child trying to guess what was lacking in her, and why tenderness seemed always to stop just short of reaching her.

Then dementia came, and with it a strange and painful unveiling. As memory weakened, so too did the habits of concealment. The illness did not create new feelings so much as strip away the social polish that had once covered them. Things that had long been muted or hidden began to appear more plainly. Old preferences, old disappointments, old emotional truths rose to the surface with an almost brutal clarity. It seemed, to the daughters, that her real feelings were coming out at last.

That is one of the cruelties of dementia that people speak of less often. We think of it as erasure, and often it is. But it can also be revelation. It can expose what a person spent a lifetime managing. It can release resentments, partialities, and loyalties that had once been kept behind the veil of self-control. For Mona and Jenka, this meant that their mother's illness was not only a matter of loss, but also of recognition. They were not simply watching her disappear. They were being confronted, perhaps more nakedly than ever before, with who she had been all along.

And so their grief became complicated. It was grief not only for the mother they were losing, but for the mother they had perhaps never truly had. In families like this, love does not disappear. It remains, but it is crossed through with other things: disappointment, longing, resentment, pity, and the unhealed ache of wanting to have been chosen more fully than one was. Dementia did not invent that ache. It merely removed the last coverings from it.

Virgil's Aeneid is strongly themed around the fate of Aeneas to lead the Trojans out of Troy to found the city of Rome. Despite resistances from the gods and battles against many peoples, the resistance to fate seldom inhibits Aeneas from leading the Trojans to Italy. However, the journey to fulfil fate starts with Troy being brought down to ashes after the deadly Trojan war and ends with the bloody killing of Turnus. Throughout the journey, loss of lives and bloodshed led to deadly violence caused by human jealousy, anger, and pride. This violence, though fated to happen, hindered the progress of the Trojans and led to the loss of lives out of wrath, which was against the values of public welfare and harmony the Roman Empire was supposed to be built on.

In the Aeneid, fate is a powerful force with the decrees of which the Roman Empire is founded. Even the divine will of gods does not hinder the fate of the Trojan people to leave Troy and journey to Italy. Though fate guided Aeneas, he and the Trojans were not free from tribulations. Juno causes him to have some deadly violent encounters while he sails from Troy, where many Trojans were killed, but her failure to change the fate of Aeneas determines that destiny overrules. Despite facing obstacles, Rome is eventually founded, but the progress and productivity is slow. The Trojans would have been more powerful if they had not lost people in the storms and faced the wrath of the gods.

The violence from the fall of Troy insinuates that Rome was founded on violence and not on the principles of respect and public welfare it was supposed to be built on. The Trojan war was based on anger, ego and jealousy. First, Zeus was concerned with the loss of his power; then Eris was enraged by not being invited to a wedding; later the jealousy of Athena, Aphrodite and Hera led to a series of events concluding with a bloody battle and the fall of Troy. Even Aeneas, the leader, is often conflicted between selfish desires and his duty, while he was supposed to honor Roman pietas and forgo personal desire for the promotion of public good.

The founding of Rome begins with the death of Turnus, again insinuating that Rome was founded on unnecessary violence. Turnus was enraged when he knew that he was losing his fiancee and his kingdom to Aeneas. Though he was aware of the fate of the Roman Empire, his wrath led to his own death and Aeneas, out of pride, did not honor Turnus. The founding of Rome was fated to happen regardless, and so deadly violence against Turnus was unproductive; it served only to show how strong emotions can lead to the downfall of an empire, similar to the fall of Troy itself. Aeneas's reaction to Turnus demeans his leadership and his claim to pietas.

Throughout the Aeneid, the central theme of fate rules above all obstacles. Fate eventually leads the Trojans to establish the Roman Empire in Italy. But several deadly instances, the Trojan war, the killing of Dido and Turnus, the fall of Carthage, did not change fate but rather slowed down the progress of the Trojans and lowered the productivity of the empire. The cause of deadly violence in most instances was emotional conflict: anger, pride, jealousy between the gods, Aeneas, Dido, and Turnus. These conflicts led to death and war, which was not the foundation the Roman Empire was supposed to build on. The concept of pietas, where people were supposed to put their own feelings below the improvement of others, was broken all the time. The lack of upheld Roman values led to instances of deadly violence which lowered the productivity of the Roman Empire, though its establishment was fated to happen.

I have been pondering a fascinating question recently: what is it that allows certain works of art to transcend the boundaries of time? What elevates a narrative so that it becomes a hallmark of human thought, serving as a wellspring of inspiration for generations of writers, directors, and cinematographers?

Take Dune, for example. It is a masterpiece that has stirred the creativity of luminaries from David Lynch to Denis Villeneuve, and woven itself into the fabric of modern science fiction. When I delved into its origins, I realised that Frank Herbert conceived this epic when actual scientific exploration was still in its infancy. Space travel was largely theoretical; humanity had not yet set foot on the moon. Yet Herbert wove a captivating, cohesive reality of a distant, alien world. It transcended the technological limitations of its era by tapping into something deeper: a profound sense of wonder, ecological complexity, and human struggle that resonates regardless of our actual scientific progress.

Then there is Citizen Kane, a film that reshaped the history of cinema and left an indelible mark on how we understand visual storytelling. Its cultural footprint is so massive that it is still constantly referenced in modern media, from sitcoms to Community, which is what ultimately prompted me to explore its enigmatic depths.

Citizen Kane challenges conventional storytelling by presenting a fragmented narrative. It is a tantalising puzzle that deliberately withholds an immediate emotional connection to its central character. Charles Foster Kane's true essence remains veiled in mystery, and the story unfolds with calculated precision, much like a mesmerising dance between light and shadow. Some modern viewers dismiss it as overrated, adopting the posture of the contrarian critic as a shortcut to feigning wisdom. But to dismiss Kane as a mere chore is a shallow approach that misses the profound revelation it offers.

What makes Citizen Kane truly extraordinary is its buoyancy: the way it grounds a massive, tragic life with simple, profound symbols. The whispered memory of "Rosebud" blossoms throughout the narrative, serving as an emotional anchor amid a tempest of wealth, ego, and political intrigue. The creative use of deep framing and the masterful play of light angles create a visual spectacle that lingers in the mind long after the final credits roll.

This brings me back to the question I started with: what makes movies like Dune or Citizen Kane transcend their eras to become guardians of artistry? I believe it is the emotional and intellectual imprints they leave behind. They do not merely tell a story; they build a new framework for how we perceive reality. Like the timeless wisdom of Jane Austen or the cultural shifts driven by the Beatles, these works endure because they offer an inexhaustible journey into the depths of the human spirit and the boundless realm of creative expression.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson's second whodunit inspired by Among Us and Agatha Christie's novels, is another twisty murder mystery frame story. Miles Bron, a tech billionaire who owns a private estate on a Greek island, organises his annual murder mystery. Benoit Blanc and six of Miles's friends are brought to the island to solve the game.

The first half of the story centres around exploring the extravagant island, the Glass Onion. The motif of the glass onion is revealed in various instances, from the murder mystery invitation to the glass ornaments in the house's interior. The central hall houses the original Mona Lisa, a painting Miles holds dear, but one that also represents the epitome of deception in this story. The secretive and mysterious nature of the Mona Lisa is reflected in Miles's character, serving as the ultimate muse for his deceptive and antagonistic nature.

The second half pivots quickly to solve the actual murder of Miles's guest, Duke. As the story shifts, an extended flashback reveals that Andi was actually killed a week before the gathering. Andi's twin sister comes in disguise to find the killer, a layered deception that I believe was the true inspiration for naming the story Glass Onion. The Beatles' song "Glass Onion," released in 1968 on the White Album, was written during the Civil Rights Movement. John Lennon wrote it with the intention of showing fans they did not need to read so deeply into their music for hidden meanings. Andi's sister, as a Black American woman trying to seek justice for her dead sibling, echoes the fight for independence and justice for Black women during that same era.

The real murder mystery seemed obvious to many from the start, largely based on Miles's actions, which appear idiotic and irrational. Miles strongly reminds the public of a certain kind of extravagant, rich tech billionaire who makes stupid decisions masked in a veneer of rationality. The anticlimactic nonchalance Miles shows at the end to the burning of the Mona Lisa highlights his hollow relationship to fame, money, and reputation.

The movie leaves a lingering sense of things being unresolved for me. Is Miles really a genius or a fool? What does the Mona Lisa truly reveal about these characters, and whose reflection is it catching? Glass Onion, though it feels slightly incomplete compared to Knives Out, leaves me with a philosophical sense of mystery that cannot be neatly solved. Perhaps future instalments in the series will unravel the overarching mystery of who Benoit Blanc actually is: destined to become another Sherlock Holmes, serving as the immutable centre of gravity, or an enigmatic observer passing through other people's chaotic lives?

This essay is also available as a preprint on Preprints.org.

The emergence of life has long been a topic of fascination and inquiry among scientists, philosophers, and curious minds alike. Delving into the possibility of instant creation of synthetic life, and examining it in the wider context of the emergence of natural life over billions of years, opens up a realm of intriguing questions. What insights can we glean from the existence of life on Earth? What nuances are concealed in our current dominant understandings of life and its sustenance? In this essay, I will examine the notion that life may have originated by chance as a self-perpetuating system away from equilibrium, and consider the prospects of recreating this phenomenon synthetically in a shorter time frame.

Over its 4.5 billion-year history, Earth has undergone significant geological and biological transformations from the evolution of single-celled organisms to complex multicellular life, to the formation and breakup of continents, ice ages, and the rise and extinction of countless species. As scientists, we define life as a self-sufficient chemical system that can process, transform, and accumulate information from its surroundings. The mechanisms through which these characteristics emerged from non-living matter on early Earth were not understood until the groundbreaking Urey-Miller experiment, which showed that the building blocks of life, such as amino acids, can arise from inorganic matter.

The development of life, from building blocks such as amino acids to functional molecules like proteins and RNA, to the complex multicellular systems we see today, was a long and complex process driven by chance and necessity. In his 1971 book, Jacques Monod posited that life is not only a chance occurrence but also has a purpose and necessity. Monod believed that living organisms must be both autonomously morphogenetic and reproductively invariant to be considered alive. Being autonomously morphogenetic allows life to self-organise and develop its own shape without external influence, and being reproductively invariant refers to the stable production of similar genetic offspring.

Autonomously morphogenetic living systems require a constant input of energy to maintain their ordered and complex organisation. This demand for energy inherently means that living systems are always away from thermodynamic equilibrium, as they need to create and maintain ordered structures that are typically disordered in nature. In 1977, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine demonstrated that complex matter can undergo spontaneous and irreversible processes that lead to self-organisation and increased order. Therefore, the spontaneous emergence of life is a consequence of the laws of physics pushing a living system away from equilibrium.

Living systems have evolved various mechanisms to maintain their organisation, often controlled by external agents known as Maxwell's demons: hypothetical machinery in life that can manipulate the energy levels of particles within a system. Such mechanisms include the transfer of ATP energy molecules across cell membranes, the movement of neurotransmitters in neurons, and the self-assembly of proteins by chaperones. The concept of bifurcation provides a useful complement here: small changes in a system's parameters can lead to significant changes in its behaviour. This spontaneous emergence was first demonstrated by Alan Turing in his work on Turing patterns, showing how self-organising patterns can emerge from differences in concentration gradients of activators and inhibitors.

For self-perpetuation, biological systems require inherent information that can govern their fate. Genetic information in living systems largely dictates these criteria, but living systems also exhibit learning: they can adapt to new information by creating memory. DNA carries encoded genetic instructions that govern the growth and function of living organisms. The transfer of genetic information between organisms, as occurs through homologous recombination and CRISPR, provides evidence of the sophisticated computing abilities of biological systems shaped by evolution.

Synthetic biology is an emerging field that aims to create new biological systems. In 2010, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the creation of the first synthetic bacterial cell by assembling the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides from scratch. While these synthetic cells can carry out basic functions and replicate, they lack the complexity and autonomy of natural living systems. The development of life as we know it today took billions of years to evolve through natural selection, genetic mutations, and environmental interactions.

Despite advancements in genetic engineering and biotechnology, creating new life forms from scratch remains a formidable task. Nevertheless, the development of synthetic biology has the potential to revolutionise fields such as medicine, biotechnology, and environmental science. If realised, synthetic life forms may represent a new era of life, distinct from the forms we know today, with profound implications for our understanding of life and its consequences for society and the environment.

Walking through the historic code-breaking sites of World War II, at Bletchley Park, as a biologist it is a surreal experience that draws intriguing parallels between the mysteries of science and the secrets of war. Studying the genetic code on a daily basis, I cannot help but notice the striking similarities between the organisation of the code-breaking pamphlets used during the war and the intricate patterns and sequences of DNA that I analyse on a computer. It is as if the two worlds have collided, transporting me to a place where the past and present converge.

During the World War, Bletchley Park was a cypher school with people working towards deciphering the hardest code to crack: the Enigma code. A similar code in biology was deciphered by the Human Genome Project. The DNA molecule, a double helix structure of nucleotides (adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine), is the most important biological information storage and processing system known to us. It encodes all the processes of life, dictating how living organisms function from birth to death.

The genius work of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park led to the concept of the Turing Machine, a theoretical construct that can simulate any algorithm and is considered the foundation of modern computing. He developed a Turing machine with two tasks: to write information into an infinitely long loop (tape), and to read and perform a computational task.

Alan Turing's idea of the Turing tape draws parallels to the fundamental workings of biological systems. DNA can be seen as a tape-like structure that contains the genetic information necessary for the functioning of living organisms, where the nucleotides that make up DNA can be thought of as the symbols on the Turing Tape. These four nucleotides are the basic building blocks of life, just like the symbols on the Turing Tape represent the basic building blocks of computation. The sequence of nucleotides on the DNA strand can be manipulated by various cellular processes that follow specific sets of rules, analogous to the operations of a Turing Machine, which manipulates symbols according to a set of rules defined by a program.

The concept of DNA as a Turing Tape has profound implications for our understanding of life and the nature of computation. It suggests that the fundamental principles of computation are deeply intertwined with the basic processes of life, and that the boundary between the two may be more blurred than we previously thought. It is not too far in the future where we can create molecular computers through DNA, which has an impeccably dense capacity to store information in a small volume in an energy efficient way.

But as I walk away from Bletchley Park, I leave reminded of the power of human ingenuity and the ways in which our understanding of the world is constantly evolving. Who knows what secrets and mysteries we will unlock in the years to come, or what new connections we will uncover between seemingly unrelated fields of study?

Ever wondered how much your university pays towards electricity bills, when they usually have 30,000 students to accommodate in rooms, classrooms, labs, and miscellaneous spaces? The importance of energy conservation in universities cannot be overemphasised, especially when one considers the scale of energy consumption in these institutions.

In the United Kingdom, universities are responsible for a significant proportion of the public sector's carbon footprint, accounting for a large portion of the £3.4bn energy cost incurred annually, about 13.3 MtCO2. Large universities, home to over 30,000 students and accommodated in classrooms, labs, research facilities, academic buildings, and miscellaneous spaces, cost the UK government an annual energy bill of approximately £397 million and a carbon footprint of 1.8 MtCO2.

The current Energy Price Guarantee program, launched on 21 September 2022, set wholesale prices for non-domestic consumers, including public universities, at £211 per MWh for electricity and £75 per MWh for gas. The UK subsidises and covers parts of the electricity bill for universities amounting to £400m every year. Below is a breakdown of energy costs and consumption at some of the most energy-consuming universities in the UK.

Being a biologist, I am curious to know how my building facilities use power. Laboratories are voracious consumers of electricity: typical labs consume 5 to 10 times more energy per square foot than an office building. A recent case study on shaking incubators at The Francis Crick Institute, King's College, and MRC Labs of Molecular Biology shows that the energy consumption of these units while heating and shaking is similar to that of an ultra-low temperature freezer per hour. An Eppendorf F570H cryotube consumes 0.317 kWh per hour at -80C, the same average consumption per hour of an average British household with 2.4 people. A laminar flow cabinet consumes approximately 460 to 525 W per hour. For perspective, a 32-inch LED TV consumes 60W per hour.

There is a huge need to understand power usage in university buildings, the contributors to power consumption, and ways of mitigating extensive power usage. With the ongoing pressures of rising energy costs and the urgency of climate action, universities must prioritise energy conservation and explore sustainable energy alternatives to reduce both energy costs and carbon emissions.

This piece is a work in progress.

Imagine an uproar where Uber's cars start arriving without a driver. We are not very far from this in the future. Nick Bostrom talks about this extensively in his books where automation and technology is changing the labour force. Half or more of the increasing gap in wages among American workers over the last 40 years is attributable to the automation of tasks formerly done by human workers, especially men without college degrees.

Technology is rapidly changing developing areas of scientific knowledge related to humans' everyday lives. Just silicon chips since their discovery in the 1960s are changing how people interact. From the smartphones in our pockets to the vast data centres powering the internet, from electric scooters to hypersonic aircraft, pacemakers to weather-predicting supercomputers: inside every one of them, unseen and unsung, are tiny pieces of tech that make it all possible. Digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any innovation in our history, reaching around 50% of the developing world's population in only two decades and transforming societies.

But this rapid increase in technology development, so fast that it is hard for humans to keep up, opens doors to an increased concentration of wealth and power.

As an example, in India where I grew up, COVID-19 accelerated this transformation dramatically. During the pandemic, penetration of digital technology that would have otherwise taken 5 years to achieve was accomplished in 2 months. Telehealth in Tier 1 and 2 cities is now common, online banking is common, and the digital reset of the Indian economy has seeped into almost every aspect of life. However, there were millions of people at the same time who were left homeless because of technology replacing labour in banks and schools.

During the end of the pandemic, I visited Ghana for fieldwork in ophthalmology care. The stark contrast in access to technology was shocking: how the same technology used to save lives in other parts of the world was not as widely used, and people lacked knowledge of it.

The progress of technology across countries has been measured and found to be associated with inequality. We are still battling issues of diversity, inaccessibility of information, and systemic bias. Succeeding in the task of reducing inequality requires an understanding of how technological progress affects productivity, why the automation trap is so tempting to different groups, and a vision of how we can do better.

When I first began my PhD, my vision for the thesis was strongly influenced by the work of Jacques Monod. His studies of bacterial growth and gene regulation, particularly the lac operon and the phenomenon of diauxic growth, demonstrated that metabolism is not a static process but a dynamic response to environmental conditions.

Some of the pioneers at the forefront of our understanding of sugar metabolism include Otto Warburg, Hans Krebs, and Jacques Monod. Warburg's observations that cancer cells preferentially ferment glucose to lactate even in the presence of oxygen led to the concept of aerobic glycolysis, now widely known as the Warburg effect. His work highlighted that cellular metabolism is governed not only by energetic demands but also by the biosynthetic requirements of growth and proliferation. Building upon these foundations, Hans Krebs elucidated the citric acid cycle, establishing the central role of oxidative metabolism in energy production.

While Warburg and Krebs focused primarily on metabolic pathways, Monod shifted attention towards the regulatory principles that determine how and when these pathways are used. Together with François Jacob, Monod investigated how bacteria adapt to changing nutrient environments. Their studies of the lac operon revealed that gene expression is tightly coupled to nutrient availability and established the paradigm of genetic regulation in response to environmental cues.

One of the most striking examples of metabolic adaptation is diauxic growth in Escherichia coli. When both glucose and lactose are present, E. coli preferentially consumes glucose. Only after glucose is exhausted does the cell activate the genetic machinery required for lactose uptake and metabolism. This transition is accompanied by a lag phase, during which cells reorganise their transcriptional and metabolic programs before resuming growth.

The lag phase associated with diauxic growth is increasingly understood as an adaptive trade-off rather than a simple delay. Cells must balance rapid adaptation against maximal growth. The optimal lag phase therefore depends on the statistical properties of the environment, with stable environments favouring efficient growth and fluctuating environments favouring rapid switching between metabolic states.

From Warburg's discovery of aerobic glycolysis, through Krebs' elucidation of central carbon metabolism, to Monod and Jacob's formulation of genetic regulation and diauxic growth, a common theme emerges: cellular metabolism is fundamentally dynamic. Cells continuously sense, evaluate, and respond to their environment, shifting between metabolic states in ways that reflect both immediate physiological demands and long-term evolutionary pressures.

Ever wondered why there are so many different varieties of dosa with different textures and flavours? Not the famous "99 varieties" found on restaurant menus, but the dosas themselves. Why is a neer dosa soft and delicate, a rava dosa lacy and crisp, and a set dosa fluffy and porous? What makes each dosa different, and how do they form their unique patterns? There must be something in their physics and chemistry that makes them this way.

When dosa batter is poured onto a heated tawa, it is no longer simply a mixture of rice and water. It becomes a dynamic physical system undergoing rapid transformations. Within seconds, water evaporates, starch gelatinises, proteins denature, gases expand, and the batter transitions from a liquid into a porous solid. The remarkable patterns that emerge are not deliberately created. Instead, they arise through a process of self-organisation. Tiny differences in temperature, viscosity, surface roughness, and water distribution cause bubbles to appear at different locations. In many ways, every dosa is a unique record of microscopic physical events occurring during cooking.

One of the most important phenomena involved in dosa formation is the generation of steam. When water encounters a sufficiently hot surface, it can briefly float on a thin cushion of its own vapour: the Leidenfrost effect. As the batter contacts the hot tawa, water rapidly vaporises and steam begins to form underneath and within the batter. These steam pockets create bubbles that lift portions of the batter from the surface. The bubbles eventually rupture, leaving behind pores and holes. The characteristic holes seen in many dosas are therefore the visible traces of steam escaping during cooking.

Among all dosas, rava dosa is perhaps the most fascinating from a physics perspective. Unlike regular dosa batter, rava dosa batter is extremely dilute and has low viscosity. When poured onto a hot pan, the liquid spreads rapidly before it can solidify. Water evaporates almost immediately, causing local ruptures and gaps to form throughout the structure. The batter breaks into interconnected filaments that resemble lace, similar to patterns observed in drying films, crack formation, and river networks. The characteristic lace-like appearance of rava dosa is not intentional: it emerges naturally from the interplay between fluid flow, evaporation, and surface tension.

Fermentation fundamentally alters the properties of dosa batter. Microorganisms consume carbohydrates and produce organic acids and gases, making the batter both more viscous and more aerated. Microscopic gas pockets become trapped throughout the batter, providing pre-existing sites for bubble formation during cooking. This explains why traditional fermented dosas have a lighter texture and more complex internal architecture. Set dosa is thicker and softer because fermentation has introduced a large number of trapped gas pockets before cooking begins; when heated, these expand while starch and proteins solidify around them, creating a sponge-like architecture similar to that found in pancakes or bread.

Another critical transformation occurs through starch gelatinisation. Rice starch absorbs water and swells when heated, typically between 65°C and 80°C. The balance between evaporation and gelatinisation determines whether a dosa becomes crispy, chewy, fluffy, or soft. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of dosa making is that no two dosas are exactly alike. Even when prepared from the same batter on the same pan, tiny differences in temperature, batter thickness, and surface roughness change where bubbles first appear. The resulting patterns emerge through a stochastic process, placing dosa in the same category as snowflakes, bacterial colonies, crystal growth, and river networks.

And this is what fascinates me about dosas, apart from their obviously delicious taste. The next time we eat a dosa, we are not merely tasting rice and lentils: we are tasting fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, fermentation, and the physics of pattern formation.

Being at King's College, Cambridge, I have often found myself drawn to questions that sit between mathematics and biology. I am particularly interested in how simple physical principles give rise to the complexity of living systems. Much of this interest has been shaped by the work of Alan Turing, whose final major paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis remains a constant reference point in mathematical biology. His intuition that patterns in living organisms can emerge from simple reaction-diffusion systems has always felt both surprisingly modern and deeply foundational. Through this lens, a central idea repeatedly appears: symmetry and the breaking of it.

Symmetry in its most general sense refers to invariance under transformation: reflection, rotation, or translation. A system is symmetric if certain operations leave it unchanged. We see symmetry commonly in nature through the bilateral body plans of animals and radial symmetry in flowers, reflecting underlying constraints and efficiencies. Yet perfect symmetry is rarely preserved in detail. Living systems are full of structured asymmetries: fingerprint patterns, pigmentation, and the consistent left-right asymmetry of internal organs.

Symmetry breaking occurs when a system that begins in a symmetric state evolves into an asymmetric one. The underlying laws remain symmetric, but the state of the system selects one outcome among many equivalent possibilities. This selection typically arises from instability. In systems pushed far from equilibrium, small fluctuations can be amplified. A previously uniform state becomes unstable and transitions into structured patterns through bifurcation. In this way, symmetry breaking is inseparable from emergence.

This plays a central role in morphogenesis, the process by which biological form develops. Embryonic systems often begin in nearly homogeneous states but quickly evolve structure through interacting chemical and mechanical processes. Turing's framework showed how such patterns can arise spontaneously from instability in uniform chemical fields. This insight remains foundational because it shows that complex biological structure can emerge without external design, purely from internal dynamics governed by simple rules.

Life can be understood deeply in this context. Living systems are not static equilibria but dynamic processes that maintain structure through constant energy exchange. They exist precisely because they operate far from equilibrium. The origin of life is a transition from relatively symmetric chemical systems to self-sustaining networks of broken symmetry. Life is therefore not an exception to physical law, but a natural consequence of systems capable of maintaining organised instability.

Ultimately, symmetry provides the invariance underlying physical law, but symmetry breaking explains how structure and complexity arise. From pattern formation in embryos to phase transitions in physical systems and the emergence of life itself, broken symmetry serves as a unifying principle of organisation. Life is not a deviation from order but a manifestation of it.

We have all heard the word chaperone. It conjures up images of school dances, field trips, and someone making sure things do not go entirely off the rails. It traces its roots to an Old French word meaning a hood or head covering: a physical shelter for something vulnerable. To chaperone is, essentially, to carry someone or something forward safely through a critical transition.

I was recently at a meeting where someone bluntly stated, "We are not here to chaperone you around." It was a sharp comment, but it rang a bell. I have used that word constantly in my own work, particularly when dealing with protein expression. It made me realise that this concept of carrying forward is not just a social construct; it is the fundamental mechanism behind almost every complex system we know.

We see this dynamic clearly in the human networks of the scientific community. In top multidisciplinary journals, a scientist is rarely able to appear as a senior author if they have not previously published in that same venue. Instead, junior researchers rely on established principal investigators to chaperone their work into these prestigious spaces. The senior author acts as an intellectual guide, carrying the newer scientists through the unspoken complexities and rigorous standards of elite journals. The data shows that the fraction of new authors is consistently smaller than the fraction of chaperoned authors, and this effect is especially pronounced in the medical and biological sciences.

It is deeply fitting that the biological sciences exhibit such a strong chaperone effect in their human networks, because biology itself relies entirely on this exact mechanism at the microscopic level. When a protein is first created, it is nothing more than a linear sequence of amino acids. To actually function, it must fold into a highly specific three-dimensional shape. This folding process is incredibly vulnerable. Without help, these fragile new proteins can easily misfold or clump together into toxic aggregates, which is the root cause of many severe diseases. Biological chaperones step in by encapsulating the new protein and providing a safe, isolated environment where the molecule can fold correctly.

Whether we are looking at a young scientist trying to find their footing in a rigorous academic landscape, or a newly synthesised protein trying to fold into a functional machine, the underlying principle is exactly the same. True complexity rarely stabilises on its own. We do not achieve our final, functional forms in isolation. From the molecular architecture of our cells to the ways we build and share human knowledge, we have been chaperoned along since the very beginning.

This essay was featured in BlueSci Magazine, pp. 50-53.

Biology operates across a range of scales that defies easy intuition, stretching from a 3,000-mile migration arc down to a 0.3 nm electron orbital. To a European Robin, the travel from Scandinavia to Africa is a feat of macroscopic endurance, guided by perception of the Earth's magnetic field. What seems like a marvel of animal instinct is, at its mechanistic root, a quantum phenomenon occurring in a single protein in the bird's eye. The emerging field of quantum biology proposes that life is not merely a collection of big things made of small things: it is a macroscopic consequence of subatomic phenomena.

This question is not new. In 1943, Erwin Schrodinger stepped into a lecture hall in Dublin to ask: what is life? He, along with Niels Bohr and Max Delbruck, sensed that the classical laws of physics were insufficient to explain the staggering stability of heredity. His answer was the aperiodic crystal, a molecule whose chemical bonds were stable enough to resist the disruptive jostling of thermal noise. It was a prediction that pointed directly toward the structure of DNA, which Watson and Crick would confirm a decade later. The consensus that followed was that the cell was too "warm, wet, and noisy" for quantum coherence to survive. That consensus is now being systematically dismantled.

Consider the photosynthetic apparatus. When a photon strikes a light-harvesting antenna protein, it creates a quasiparticle known as an exciton. In a classical framework, this excitation would migrate by incoherent Forster hopping, a stochastic process that predicts substantial energy dissipation. Yet measured quantum efficiency in living photosystems routinely exceeds 95%. The resolution came in 2007, when Fleming and colleagues applied two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy to the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex. The spectra revealed long-lived oscillatory features that are the spectroscopic signature of quantum coherence: the exciton was propagating as a coherent superposition across multiple pigment molecules simultaneously, sampling all available transfer pathways in parallel.

Every chemical reaction in a cell faces the same fundamental problem: breaking existing chemical bonds costs energy. Classical physics describes this as climbing an activation energy barrier. For enzymes that transfer hydrogen atoms or protons, something goes wrong with this picture. The rates are too fast, the apparent barriers too low, and in some cases the reaction speed barely changes with temperature at all. The molecule is not climbing the hill. It is passing through it. This is quantum tunnelling. Because matter at small scales behaves as a wave, a proton's wave function extends through and beyond the barrier. When Judith Klinman's group at Berkeley and Nigel Scrutton's group at Manchester applied kinetic isotope effect measurements to enzymes, the slowdown they observed upon substituting deuterium for hydrogen was an order of magnitude larger than any classical model could account for. Tunnelling was not a minor correction. It was the dominant mechanism.

Purple acid phosphatase, found across plants, animals, and bacteria, contains two metal ions at its core, one iron and one zinc. These metals do more than simply position the substrate. Their electrons occupy quantum mechanical orbitals that overlap directly with the electrons of the reacting molecule, creating an electronic pathway through which the chemistry flows. The metal centre is not a passive scaffold. It is a quantum mechanical device.

The same quantum architecture underlies the fact that you are reading these words at all. When a photon enters your eye and strikes the rhodopsin protein in a retinal cell, it triggers a geometric rearrangement of the retinal chromophore in approximately 200 femtoseconds, the fastest known photochemical reaction in any living system. Colour vision is a set of three quantum detectors. Each of the three cone photoreceptors contains the same retinal chromophore, but surrounded by a slightly different protein environment. The colour you perceive is a quantum energy gap, shaped by a protein.

The robin does not know this. Every autumn it turns its head, reads a field that human instruments can barely detect, and flies three thousand miles, guided by the spin of two electrons in a protein in its eye: electrons whose quantum states persist in the warm, wet chaos of a living cell because evolution, over billions of years, found a way to make them last. The smallest things in physics are doing the largest work in biology. They always were. We are only now learning to see it.

John Rose Prize, King's College Cambridge, 2026.

To see the world around us, we usually need three things: a light source, an object for the light to bounce off, and our eyes to catch it. The sun lights a leaf; the leaf bounces that light toward us; we see green. But what happens when the object is the light? When something glows from the inside out, with no flame and no spark?

Every traditional light source works the same way: it gets something so hot that it glows. This is called incandescence, and it is staggeringly wasteful. A traditional lightbulb converts only about five percent of its energy into visible light; the rest is thrown away as heat. Nature found a better way. Certain living things produce "cold light": visible light generated not by heat, but by precise chemical reactions that channel nearly all their energy directly into photons. It is, by any engineering standard, a remarkable piece of design. And it is ancient.

In his philosophical treatise De Anima, written around 350 BC, Aristotle noted that certain things like rotting wood or dead fish emitted a visible glow that had nothing to do with the sun or fire. What he was almost certainly seeing was foxfire: the faint, ghostly luminescence of fungi breaking down old logs. Pliny the Elder later documented the glow of the pulmo marinus, the jellyfish Pelagia noctiluca, recording that sailors watched it light up the water when struck by ship oars, and that the luminescent slime continued to glow on nets and hands long after being pulled from the sea.

That puzzle has a deep evolutionary answer and it begins not with light, but with poison. Billions of years ago, when oxygen first began to accumulate in Earth's oceans, it was actually toxic to the primitive cells living there. To survive, these early organisms developed internal chemicals that could neutralise the dangerous oxygen. When those chemicals reacted, they released a tiny burst of energy, and some of that energy escaped as a faint, accidental spark of light. At first, the glow was meaningless. But evolution is the ultimate recycler. Over hundreds of millions of years, organisms found uses for that accidental light: attracting mates, luring prey, startling predators, signalling in the pitch-black deep ocean. The light-producing molecule became luciferin; the enzyme became luciferase. This trick has been independently reinvented nearly a hundred separate times. Bioluminescence is not a curiosity. It is one of evolution's greatest hits.

Fluorescence is a different phenomenon: a fluorescent molecule absorbs light of one colour and immediately re-emits it as a different, visible colour. The light that comes out is always shifted toward longer wavelengths, because a tiny fraction of the absorbed energy is lost to internal vibrations. This gap between the absorbed and emitted colour is called the Stokes Shift, worked out in the 1850s by the Irish physicist George Gabriel Stokes, and it underpins virtually every fluorescence-based technology in modern science.

For half a billion years, glowing proteins were nature's private technology. Then humans learned how to borrow them. Beginning in the early 1960s, the marine biologist Osamu Shimomura collected and processed roughly fifty thousand jellyfish off the coast of Washington State, isolating the molecules responsible for their glow. From this enormous effort, he extracted Green Fluorescent Protein, or GFP. The gene for GFP could be attached to virtually any other gene in any organism, and when that fused gene was switched on inside a living cell, the protein it produced would carry the GFP tag with it and glow green under the microscope. For the first time, biologists could watch a single protein being made, moving through a cell, finding its target, and doing its job, all in real time, in a living organism. Shimomura shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien for this work.

There is a pattern that runs through this entire story. Aristotle noticed a glow on rotting wood and asked what it was. Stokes shone ultraviolet light on a crystal and asked why the colour changed. Shimomura squeezed fifty thousand jellyfish and asked what made them glow. None of them set out to build the tools that their work eventually became. They simply observed something carefully, asked the right question, and followed it wherever it led. And five hundred million years after the first accidental photon, we are still following it.

I keep coming back to a specific photograph in the Cambridge University digital archives. It shows James Clerk Maxwell, a man whose work fundamentally reshaped our understanding of reality. My fascination with Maxwell goes far beyond his equations. What draws me to him so strongly is his deep, unwavering faith. He possessed a profound belief in an ordered, divine creation, yet he is famously remembered in physics for conceptualising a demon.

There is a beautiful paradox here. We traditionally envision an angelic God who brings light and ultimate order, but the second law of thermodynamics tells a different story. It dictates that the energy of the universe is constantly dissipating. Entropy is always increasing, and everything naturally decays toward a state of uniform disorder. In the midst of this, Maxwell imagined a microscopic entity that could sit at a gateway and sort fast molecules from slow ones: a demon designed to actively resist the universal tide of entropy, pulling order out of chaos.

And the thing is, this is actually how biology works. The boundary between the living and the non-living is not just a philosophical idea; it is a literal, physical structure. Life requires a container, and at the cellular level, this is the cell membrane: a double layer of phospholipids formed by pure thermodynamic necessity. The molecules arrange themselves with their hydrophilic heads pointing outward toward the water and their hydrophobic tails hiding inward, creating a private interior space distinct from the chaos of the outside world.

But a perfect barrier is a dead barrier. If a cell were completely sealed off, it would quickly succumb to entropy. To survive, a cell must exchange resources and selectively let the outside world in. This requires mediators, which is exactly what membrane proteins are. Intrinsic proteins plunge directly into the hydrophobic core of the bilayer, acting as channels, receptors, and pumps. They actively monitor the gates of the cell and, by using energy, pump ions and molecules against their natural concentration gradients. They create the electrical potentials that fire our neurons and the proton gradients that generate our ATP. They are the biological realisation of Maxwell's thought experiment.

Ultimately, the thermodynamic laws are absolute. The biological demon does not defeat the laws of physics but operates within them to create temporary, local pockets of brilliant order. If a cell were to ever reach true thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment, it would be dead. Life is an active state of organised instability, and intrinsic membrane proteins are the microscopic engines that maintain it, standing at the boundary of the cell, endlessly burning energy and sorting molecules, holding the ultimate decay of the universe at bay so that the complexity of life can exist.

I have always been fascinated by Jacques Monod's 1971 book Chance and Necessity. In many ways, it has become the foundation for much of what I write. The reason I keep returning to this text is because Monod manages to define, quite universally, what actually makes a living thing living.

Monod posited that living organisms must possess three essential properties to be considered truly alive. First, life is teleonomic: it operates with an inherent project or purpose. Second, living organisms are autonomously morphogenetic: they have the capacity to self-organise and develop their own physical shape without external instruction. Finally, they must exhibit reproductive invariance, ensuring the highly stable transmission of genetic information from one generation to the next.

These three properties are what took raw, inorganic geological dynamics and transformed them into life. But from a physical perspective, maintaining this state is incredibly demanding. Autonomously morphogenetic systems require a constant, massive input of energy to sustain their complex organisation. They are actively fighting against the natural tendency of the universe to degrade into disorder. Living systems are inherently out of balance. They exist strictly away from thermodynamic equilibrium.

We see this constant energy expenditure in everyday biological processes, such as body temperature regulation. Maintaining a stable internal core while the external environment wildly fluctuates requires an energy-intensive mechanism that constantly generates and dissipates heat. The very origin of life is fundamentally linked to the availability and utilisation of immense energy sources, such as geothermal vents or lightning strikes. Life, at its core, is a delicate, self-sustaining reaction that simply refuses to settle into balance.

What I find most compelling about Monod is that he refuses to separate the scientific from the philosophical. Chance, in his framework, refers to the random molecular events that give rise to genetic mutations. Necessity refers to the deterministic laws of chemistry and physics that constrain which of those random events can survive and propagate. Together, they account for the whole of biology. There is no room left, in his view, for purpose imposed from outside. And yet he ends the book with something close to moral urgency: if we are the accidental products of blind chance, then the values we choose to live by are entirely our own responsibility. That conclusion has stayed with me.

Refrigeration is crucial for preserving biological samples and reagents. Lower temperatures reduce enzyme activity, which is a catalytic process. Catalytic processes are sped up at higher temperatures, which could lead to degradation or unwanted conversion of biological substrates. When the fridge door is opened, warm air from the outside environment enters and items inside absorb heat, causing the temperature to rise. The compressor needs to work harder to maintain the setpoint, which can cause fluctuations that affect sample stability.

To investigate the temperature changes caused by opening the fridge, I used a thermal camera to monitor samples before and after removal. The videos below show exactly what happens at the molecular level when you handle your tubes.

Part 1: Thermal camera in the freezer
Part 2: Temperature changes in tubes after removal

Is there a difference between using a black plastic box versus a differently coloured one? A black box absorbs more heat faster, making it less favourable when you open the fridge often. When you open a box, the air trapped inside is initially at -20C, and plastics have a high heat capacity that slows the temperature change. But the data tells a more nuanced story.

Some practical tips from these observations:

1. Do not leave the box open. Even if you take it out of the fridge, close it immediately after removing your item. The air inside is still maintained at -20C for a minute or so, after which temperature starts dropping.
2. It takes about 3 minutes after taking a box out for tubes inside to also start losing heat.
3. Eppendorf tubes have a higher specific heat and take longer to warm up. Cryovials have an even higher heat capacity and are better at trapping cold. However, an Eppendorf tube can lose about 5C in 2 minutes.
4. Solids lose temperature faster than the air around them.
5. Store your tubes in aluminium granules. They are cheap, have high thermal conductivity, and help maintain the cold temperature of your samples far better than air alone.

Emergence as a phenomenon is often cited when new properties are found within a whole system that are simply not intrinsic to the individual parts when taken in isolation. Life is the ultimate example of this. Because life is so profoundly complex and difficult to explain, we often resort to using limits, approximations, or generalisable arguments to describe natural phenomena. But unlike the strict view of a reductionist, understanding life requires more than just breaking it down to its smallest components. The arrangement of the parts matters just as much as the parts themselves.

This anti-reductionist understanding is where the field of synthetic biology finds its roots. It grew directly out of systems biology, which began looking at life through the lens of networks and patterns of organisation. The goal was to fit the chaotic reality of life into a coherent, observable framework. If systems biology is the attempt to map these complex emergent networks, synthetic biology is the bold attempt to engineer them from scratch. Biomimetics and synthetic design push us to ask whether we can artificially construct the conditions necessary for emergence.

Life likely originated by chance as a self-perpetuating system operating strictly away from thermodynamic equilibrium. It is a delicate, continuous fight against entropy that took nature billions of years of trial and error to stabilise. This makes the core ambition of synthetic biology all the more staggering. We are attempting to recreate this deeply complex phenomenon synthetically in a radically compressed time frame.

Through a critical lens, examining the leap from chemical origins to synthetic biology forces us to ask what it truly takes to spark emergence. To build life in a lab, we cannot just assemble the correct isolated parts. We must perfectly engineer a system that naturally wants to push itself out of balance and sustain its own complexity. The question is not just whether we can assemble the right molecules. It is whether we can engineer the right relationships between them.

We often hear of famous scientists whose groundbreaking experiments result in phenomena named in their honour. Two such foundational rules are the Stokes shift, discovered by George Gabriel Stokes, and diauxie, formulated by Jacques Monod. Both discoveries paved the way for modern physics and molecular biology, establishing strict rules for how energy and nutrients flow through physical and biological systems. But there is something uniquely fascinating about the discovery of an "anti-phenomenon": where nature perfectly inverts a rule that seemed absolute.

In 1852, Stokes published a paper titled "On the Refrangibility of Light," describing experiments where he passed light through organic and inorganic samples such as chlorophyll water, quinine, and fluorite crystals. He observed that the wavelength of the emitted light was always longer than the original absorbed light. Because a portion of the absorbed energy is inevitably dissipated as heat before emission, the outgoing photon carries less energy. This predictable loss became known as the Stokes shift.

But physics rarely settles for absolute limitations. Later developments, including the application of Raman spectroscopy, revealed exceptions to this rule: the anti-Stokes shift. In these cases, the emitted photon actually has a shorter wavelength and higher energy than the absorbed one. The molecule manages to borrow pre-existing thermal energy from its environment or pool energy from multiple excitations to emit a more energetic photon. It feels like a brilliant inversion of expected thermodynamic decay, proving that systems can utilise ambient energy to push upward against the rules of emission.

A century after Stokes, Jacques Monod observed a similarly rigid rule in biology. He discovered diauxie: bacteria placed in a mixture of two sugars consume them in a strict, hierarchical sequence. They exhaust the preferred energy source, pause to completely retool their genetic and cellular machinery, and only then begin to consume the secondary sugar. Yet modern biology has revealed anti-diauxie. Some organisms completely invert the expected sequence, prioritising the supposedly secondary nutrient first, or co-utilising both carbon sources simultaneously.

The existence of these anti-phenomena does not diminish the brilliance of the original discoveries. Instead, they reveal the immense hidden complexity of natural systems. Whether it is a fluorophore borrowing ambient heat to emit a brighter light or a biological cell rewriting its metabolic hierarchy to survive, these exceptions remind us that nature is endlessly dynamic. Natural systems are remarkably adept at exploiting environmental noise and structural complexity to push back against the expected downhill flow of energy.

There is a prevailing assumption that science exists in a vacuum. We tend to picture the laboratory as a sterile sanctuary where objective truths are passively discovered. But as Bruno Latour pointed out, the interaction between human and nature is inherently political. When we say a process is political, we do not just mean partisan elections or government policies. We mean the negotiation of power, resources, and human values intersecting with the physical world. Science is an active negotiation. The natural world pushes back, and human institutions dictate exactly how, when, and why we are allowed to study it.

We can see this deeply entangled relationship in the historical work of Linus Pauling. At institutions like Caltech, Pauling operated in the shadow of early twentieth century eugenicists who used the authority of science to justify extreme social control and biological racism. Pauling fought against this reductionist, racist paradigm by shifting the focus of genetics to molecular biology and broad public health. He famously identified the molecular basis of sickle cell anaemia, proving that genetic diseases were structural, chemical realities rather than vague racial defects. His work was a massive paradigm shift for public health.

Yet even Pauling could not escape the political nature of human and nature interaction. In his zeal to eradicate genetic disease, he controversially suggested in 1968 that carriers of defective genes should have visible forehead tattoos to prevent them from marrying and passing on the trait. This perfectly illustrates Latour's point. Science is never just a sterile truth. It is a messy negotiation where our attempts to manage nature are completely entangled with our social biases and our desires for control.

But to really understand how deeply the chaos of the world bleeds into the laboratory, we do not just have to look at Nobel laureates. Take Daniel Charles Harris's 1973 Caltech PhD thesis, titled simply and ironically "more fun than anything." Harris openly shatters the myth of the solitary genius by acknowledging that his thesis would never have been finished without his wife, who actually performed many of his experiments during a period when he was incapacitated. He casually notes that if he had been incapacitated longer, it might have actually been a damned good thesis.

But it is his formal acknowledgments that truly bring Latour's concept into focus. Harris thanks the National Science Foundation for their support, noting that he was supported by a fellowship until it went out of the fellowship business in 1971. He then dryly writes: "I am indebted to Richard Nixon for that. I am also indebted to Mr. Nixon for continuing the war in Asia during my entire stay in graduate school and thereby making life that much more exciting at home and lethal abroad."

This is the reality of science. It is not an ivory tower. It is a researcher trying to finish their experiments while funding dries up, political regimes change, and wars rage in the background. Whether it is Pauling navigating the fraught ethics of genetics or Harris writing his chemistry thesis during the Vietnam War, human interaction with nature is always mediated by the political realities of the time. The chaos we feel today is not new. It is simply the environment in which knowledge has always been built.