I Think This is Beautiful

Here is an excerpt from a post by Girl Scientist that I found very moving. She is reflecting on a lecture she gave to her Anatomy and Physisiology class on RNA and DNA and proteins:

After lecture was over, they [the students] gathered around me like wet sheep asking plaintively, "Do we have to know all these details for the exam, like, you know, what the signal peptide does? and Do we have to memorize the codons and their amino acids for the exam?

I responded, feeling annoyed with myself for wasting their precious and limited lecture time on details, annoyed to realize that I was not strictly teaching to the test as the other Adjuncts always advise me to do. No, you don't have to remember all the details. I told you about some of the details because I think they beautiful....

....I told you those details because I am a scientist who is deeply awed and in love with my subject and I wish you to be awed and to love it, too.

I wish my students to see that molecular biology is a bold masterpiece upon which rests the larger masterpiece of life. I wish my students to realize that every gene represents a brushstroke within this masterpiece, each one unique and special. I wish my students to understand that individual genes contain, within their sequences, the record of their passage through time and that deciphering the story contained within our DNA is to learn about our history. I wish my students to recognize that even as our genes disclose our distant past, they also reveal how our lives are intimately intertwined with all life on earth. I wish my students to learn that even though they are defined and described by their genes, their individual fates are not dictated by their genes any more than by the stars. And last but not least, I wish my students to understand that nature is the great scientist and we all are her pupils, that we are trying to decipher her grand and multi-faceted experiments as they unfold before our eyes, each one possessing an itinerant beauty and completeness that defy mere words.