update: a purposeful life

I'm trying to gather thoughts for my statement. it's kind of in a reverse order. i should prob write the actual thing the other way...


What do I want to do?

1. The science part: Learn about neural substrates of basic behaviors in simple organisms

a. basic reward/punishment driven behaviors. i think these behaviors are evolutionarily fundamental, being the minimal and crucial requirement for survival machines(dawkins). and simple enough to understand in our life time. they are probably hugely conserved, so the comparison between species could reveal quite a bit of insights into the principles of protein functions, cellular behaviors and network organization and properties. before comparison comes the need to understand.

i. to understand how a machine survives by responding differently towards the two types of external signals such as:

Me sees manuka Honey and tells myself: This is good stuff. Go for it,

or

Me sees an unripen orange and tells myself: This is bad bad for you. Avoid it.

ii. So what Charles does is interesting in this aspect. Sensory system. The first relay in the whole “I want to eat THIS” activity. So goes for Richard Axel. And the pheromone people. the chemistry is fascinating. think rhodopsin. and the coding is cool. think olfactory system. implications of the sensory system other than for the pure sake of understanding it: prosthetics. eletronic retina. new cochlea. blah blah.

iii. But motor is also fun, just difficult to do I think. Cos it comes out of the black box, which is the brain. you can't quite see the input.. so i dont' think you can control the variables as well as in sensory system. but the coding is way cool(think how flies fly and how fish swim and how easily we walk around, while our technologies are barely good enough to make a robot who stands on two legs), although the chemistry at the end of motoneurons isn't. implications: again, prosthetics. new legs. new arm. new vocal chord.

iv. Central… em… I don’t know. both input and output seem difficult to control for. but this steps on what people most fascinatedly relate to neuroscience: things like emotions and consciousness. i don't think we are ready to do it yet. (of course according to the churchlands, maybe these things don't even exist.) but more basic than emotions, integration of information, such as sensory-motor integration at the CNS level is an very important and interesting thing, but still a bit too difficult for a phd project. implications: things that meddle with your perceptions and intentions. matrix at last...muahahahah.

vi. both the biochemistry and the computation involved in the functionality of the brain are intriguing. so i want to do both. which means, in terms of methodology i'm open to both molecular biology/biochemical studies AND electrophysiology. of course, both would be combined to new imaging techniques...

v. I'm not too thrilled about the metabolism and upkeep of the nervous system. such as neural stem cells, cancer and its immune system. they aren't what's so special about the brain and its pods, but some housekeeping phenomena that happen all over the body. so i don't quite care about alzheimer's for example. when you get old, nature tells you to die by giving your dominant mutations that kill your cells. and your proteins don't fold properly. and your cells degenerate. and you go senile. and that's that.

b. Of course I am fascinated by the complexity of my own mental life, but it is way to difficult to study thoroughly. so take back a step, studying simpler organisms are good enough. chances are the principles involved in making me walk towards and eat a red apple when i'm hungry is conserved with those that make a fly fly towards and suck on a red apple. (it could of course be convergent evolution and mechanisms might not be totally the same, but the principles are worth chasing after)Plus I don’t want to spend 2 years making a mouse. (:( i'm sorry AH.) therefore I only want to look at basic organisms:

i. Flies good. and we live in the same environment.

ii. Fishies good. and they have notochords. but the genetics sucks.

iii. But not as basic as chemotaxis in bacteria, cos I think those are sad. Even nanorods have chemotaxis

iv. even worms seem too simple. at least flies look like aircrafts, not just some tubes that lie around and have sex only

2. The engineering part: Developing new molecular tools to push the boundary of questions I can ask

a. Pretty things! (seeing is believing. - teacher)

i. Chemical biology. What Roger Tsien does is tremendously inspiring. I want to do what he does but I probably won't be able to do the chemistry (the prospect of learning some chemistry during my phd is rather dim..)

ii. New mol bio strategies. Lichtman’s brainbow mouse is quite cool. The molecular biology is rather complex, but the idea is simple. And original. I think this bit I can do. Without having to do chemistry part time.

iii. Which leads the discussion into huge data sets and computers

b. Infomatics…

i. We need more pple in imagics. Data processing should be automated. So that I can use it. I don’t have to learn programming to make use of the brilliance of computer pple but picking up a language doesn’t hurt (and I have been saying this for ages.) and being in a lab that has computer pple sure is good. (ok I see this point is lost)

3. The career path part: I want to eventually teach (everybody will be making this point)

a. I want to inspire just like how my various teachers and mentors inspired me.

b. I want to stay in academia cos I like ivory tower. It keeps the noise away.

c. I think I will like young pple. they are fun and random.

What have I done?

In secondary school, i studied the sciences. but it was not until university that i started to really appreciate the intricate beauty of biology. the most fundamental things i learnt from bio classes was the central dogma. gene functions and regulations. protein structures and functions. cell components and their behaviour. and then, because i was also particularly intrigued by the nervous system, i took neuro classes. In those classes i learnt what's inside the brain and some equations trying to model what happens in the brain. and then, genetic tools people use. ways people study genes, proteins, cells, systems and the whole animal. also learnt how to do recording (and that was very fun) of the action potentials.

then of course, while transmitting knowledge to the students, the professors can't really avoid imparting their philosophical stands on the kids too. after all i think my undergraduate education strengthened my physicalist materialist world view. main lessons i got from school:

1. Matters are made of atoms.
2. DNA is life.
3. Our mental life is brain chemistry and nothing more.

chemistry and physics kind of made my life more interesting. but not the most useful in my current endeavour. maybe one day i will be able to use principles from other fields to solve problems in biology. the lessons at least made it possible to understand sparingly what my friends from other subjects are talking about. in fact discussing stuff with peers from other fields with completely different perspectives and experiences prove to the most inspiring and enriching activity for me nowadays.

(sociology/philosphy/history/arts helped me understand day to day life and human species as a whole and made me a lot more open minded. hugely enjoyable things... but except churchland's class, they aren't particularly useful to work..the music minor helped me understand that it was after all very right of me not to choose music as a career haha. so i don't think the admission pple are gonna care about this.)

and then there was the lab experiences... i did a bunch of failed or near-failed experiments. and through all those, i learnt generally how to keep flies and fish alive. i learnt some rudimentary genetics in flies and fish.i kind of made a trangenic fly, and am now learning how to make transgenic fish. i did some molecular cloning and am still doing it. i have put DNA constructs into flies, cells, an fish. i have tried procedures such as immunostaining, in situ, real time pcr, transient expression experiments in fish, with varying degrees of success. and i took some pictures on confocal microscopes. that's hell of a microcope.. haha..

in the labs, in one of them in particular, i got quite 'wowed' by the scientists i met. these people hang around the lab most of the time, like it was a second home or something... i had the pleasure of witnessing how they plan clever experiments and do them with great enthusiam and great caution and tremendous ambition. and how they got excited by a huge range of things from principles of multiphoton excitation, to why tannin tastes astringent (of course, strictly astringency should be defined as a tactile sensation as opposed a taste), to why there are maps of representations in the brain, to watching live cam streaming a water hole somewhere in africa all day. it was a bloody cool community. a lot of work, a lot of fun.

seminars that i went to in undergraduate years were quite a highlight of my life then. apart from the cheese and punch, a great proportion of the talks are actually very exciting. some tell funny stories (esp the behaviour ones), some talk about new and never heard of techniques being developed. some raise controversial objections to existing theories. such as greenspan's micro evolution talk...most speakers try to pack way too much stuff into the short short 1 hour talk, so sometimes my brain was struggling to catch on most of the time. (on a side point, i always thought it was my problem, cos i didn't know enough.. but my PI now also complained about how american scientists like to pack overflowing amount of materials into talks and pple can't follow.) and then the debate between the challenging audience and the speaker was very exciting to watch.. it was almost like a sport lol...

through my various attachments (seriously, bless the labs and my incredible mentors who took me and endured my stupidity and clumsiness and inefficiency) i learnt more about biology, cool techniques, problem solving approaches and the working of the scientific enterprise.

My life stories

i could write about my travelling and studying. i guess. but the specific things i did don't matter. what's the most important thing about all these diverse experiences and exposure is that they make me open minded. and being open minded, i came to believe, is an quality indispensible to creative thinking and a rich life. as the chinese proverb says, read 10000 books, and travel 10000 miles. for the betterment of me as a person.

(ha. and i learnt how to use blockquote typing this entry)