Health Science Reviews

by Marnie McGowan

Science is black and white. It either works, or it doesn’t. The results are positive, or they are negative. We deal in absolutes, in discrete values, in contrasting ideas – until we don’t.

Because much like ourselves, science is grey. Upon analysis, we realise there is no way to separate all the parts of a whole – everything is connected.

At the beginning of this year, I thought in black and white. I felt lucky to be here after having convinced myself throughout my final year of my undergraduate degree that I would not be accepted. Getting in felt like I had made it. An acceptance into honours was like a second chance – where my undergraduate degree felt like a failure, this second degree would be perfect. I wanted flawless marks, and a project worthy of a Nobel prize. With these ambitions, there was no room for error.

But leaving no room for error is an error in itself, one possibly worse than actually making a mistake. Science is not perfect – neither are humans. I have had countless failures this year, from realising I should have studied harder in undergrad, to contaminated cell cultures and a project that sometimes feels like a tangled web of broken synapses, waiting to transmit and reveal the connections between the thoughts, ideas, and outcomes. Unlike my cell cultures though, I have grown. At least I think I have.

Somewhere between attending lectures and starting my project, I realised that things are not as binary as they may seem. No scientist has simply chosen one field of research and isolated themselves from everything else. No experimental result stands alone. There are countless connections between results, between research papers, and even between entire scientific fields.

My project itself is an attempt to bridge the gap between immunology and neuroscience – asking how cells in the brain connect to each other, and how these cellular conversations might protect us from infections.

So why, then, did I still feel so polarised? There were days where I was certain I had made the correct career choice; certain I would never want to be doing anything other than science. Then there were days where I wished to be somewhere else entirely, doing anything but science. Honours has allowed me to feel so smart, and yet so stupid at the same time – so qualified, and yet also so young and inexperienced. I have never felt so sure of something, yet so unsure at the same time.

But at some point, you have to accept that maybe grey is not such a bad colour. Sometimes, things are quite good enough as they are – although you might never be completely happy (after all, who is?), you have done what you can. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room or have the most brilliant results in order to have accomplished something great. You owe it to yourself to at least recognize this. There will be time enough for the rest.