Why do I study biology? A loaded question, but a question that I used to be asked all of the time. People assumed that I wanted to become a doctor, nurse, or other type of healthcare professional, but I didn't have a career in mind when I began studying biology. I am not studying with a specific end goal, but rather I am studying biology because I have a myriad of questions left to ask and a profound curiosity about the intricacies life.
After all, biology is the study of life. Life is within us, surrounds us, and interacts in ways far beyond my understanding. Life is plants, mammals, fish, spiders, bacteria, and microbes. Life is such a complex and dimensional topic, and I embarked on this journey in order to gain a better understanding of myself and the world that I live in. I feel a duty to not take my body and the life around myself for granted, but to understand the relationships and processes that are far more complex than I once perceived.
As humans, we love to focus on ourselves. The numerous functions that our human bodies are capable of is amazing. From obvious things like digesting food, going for a run, and growing, to less obvious things like maintaining specific blood serum calcium levels, processing different types of reflexes by cutting your brain out of the integration step and using solely your spinal cord, to generating and propagating action potentials in excitable cells by opening and closing specific ion channels and then returning to a resting membrane potential. Our bodies are insanely complex and evolved bodies. Their ability to maintain a homeostasis by regulating innumerous factors is astounding.
Biology has given myself a chance to be curious. A chance to say "why" about things that we don't yet understand. Biology is fascinating because there is so much left to know and discover, that it is unfathomable. There is still so much ocean left to explore, so many bacteria to identify and understand. There is such a diversity of life on planet Earth that we are often blind to, that learning of the diversity that we know, and what has yet to be explored adequately, has both opened my eyes and blown my mind.
Studying biology has given me a deep appreciation for the amazing human bodies that we claim ownership of. Understanding the processes of life not just in humans, but in other animals, plants, and organisms so tiny that it is difficult to perceive their existence. That is why I study biology: because learning of the past, and theorizing about the future does not scare or intimidate me, rather I am intrigued by life on the smallest scale to the large scale interactions on the planet that we call home.
