adenine cheats on thymine at every chance he gets with the ever-flirtatious, home-wrecking tramp of a nucleotide, uracil. Uracil doesn’t even have a stable career with his missing methyl group. No wonder every time the toxic pair cheats, they produce an RNA molecule that can be instantly degraded, sometimes by itself, hurting every other hardworking nucleotide because they couldn’t keep their hydrogen bonding tips to themselves. This unceasing sin of infidelity that erupted since before the dawn of life contrasts with the boundless beauty of the genome, inspiring me to study its properties and implications in human societies.
High school was an entirely new environment I never experienced before; from the thumps of the ceiling raccoons to the laughs at my weight, I immediately felt out of my element. I couldn’t wait until I would be free from the shackles of high school—until I walked into my biology class. I was fascinated by Mrs. Mathew’s enthusiastic demeanor, biology’s central dogma plastered on her wall next to the poster emphasizing that everyone shares 99% of her DNA. After many expeditions to Wikipedia’s wonky website, where a wealth of wisdom only served to deepen my absorption into the world of genetics, I was hooked.
Soon after came late rides to the library my father begrudgingly agreed to and massive books piled on my desk, so heavy I needed to wheel them around. I waded through thousands of dense pages, sometimes reading 10 pages before finding a word I recognized. Genetics was its own world, with hundreds of armored locks only opened by these fascinatingly dry books that I could not put down (figuratively, of course, because I couldn’t pick these books up in the first place). As I picked at the shackles of each lock, I understood more and more: the string of adulterous adenines and forsaken thymines married together by phosphodiester bonds promoting transcription, and thus adultery, of coding sequences and the half of the genome made of transposons, repetitive elements of the genome normally suppressed that can move between the 3 billion nucleotide pairs of the DNA double helix.
Later came my summer of 18-hour days spent studying thousands of gigabytes of RNA sequences, massive lists of unfaithful As, hideous Us, and tranquil Gs and Cs found in a cell. I joined the Ge Laboratory at MD Anderson to study these transposable elements of the genome that were found to be expressed in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, representing an issue in gene regulation. The research I work on focuses on identifying how proteins regulate the expression of transposons and the circumstances and extent to which transposons are expressed in RNA, which may shed light on the coevolution of humans with microbes. Time passed differently in the lab; I was surrounded by interesting personalities and captivated by research I’d never done before, spending my nights with my lab mates and joking about our obsession with pumpkin spice lattes.
Genetics is an endless world that we learn more about every day. Just today (December 15th) we learned that an allele common in people of African ancestry can introduce a PAM sequence which can lead to two dangerous diseases: sickle cell disease and β-thalassemia. Yesterday scientists identified 867 genes that can promote the survival of specific pancreatic cells. Not only is genetics fascinating, but is increasingly applicable to nearly everything, whether that be creating genetically modified tomato plants that have a higher yield or even using ancient genetic remnants of prehistoric viral infections (endogenous retroviruses) to create immunotherapy treatments for cancer. Genetics could be the key to conquering cancer, understanding the development of humanity, or even creating an artificial uterus. Genetics tells us secrets of identity, humanity, evolution, and development that could otherwise never be deduced.
Although my current way to understand the nature of our universe is through genetics, there are many other ways to understand our universe whether that be quantum mechanics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, environmental science, or anthropology. Understanding the universe is not only important because it may allow us to conquer many of our world’s challenges such as global warming (which can hopefully be accomplished through technologies like the newly developed solar-collecting fabric or the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s recent ability to successfully use nuclear fission to produce energy), but also because understanding the universe is simply understanding. Learning about topics such as quantum entanglement or the multiverse is simply interesting and a way to break free from the monotony of daily life. The work of countless scientists every day helps us recognize the intricacies of the universe and better understand how these intricacies may influence us. Science tells us a story that is too enthralling for us to ever put down, bringing joy during tough times and defining how we view ourselves as well as the world around us.
Through a university education, I hope to continue to learn more about the world around me. To better learn about the intricacies of the world, I hope to continue my research on transposons, especially in analyzing transposon expression during the first stages of development. I hope that my research looking at how transposons are reorganized during development can shed light on the story of human and mouse evolution, similar to Nobel Laureate Dr. Svante Pääbo’s research connecting genetics to anthropology. I hope to understand how humans can change over time and the factors that have led to many of the unique characteristics of humans. I am especially interested in understanding the development of a human’s seemingly smaller-sized corpus callosum (a connective complex between the hemispheres of the brain) even though evolution has favored a larger number of connection fibers between parts of the brain. I also hope to understand how the process of transposon reprogramming has led to the development of new alleles while keeping other important alleles intact.
Beyond biology and anthropology, I hope to use my university education as a time to explore new ideas and subjects, especially quantum mechanics. I hope to work on new research on quantum computing and learn more about randomness, combining philosophy with physics. I feel that learning about quantum mechanics would reveal so much about the universe, especially when considering its implications for how we interact with the world and how we view ourselves in relation to the universe. Moreover, quantum mechanics, especially when it comes to quantum computing, could be key to understanding some major points of contention within our universe whether that be something as simple as answering the traveling salesman problem or something as complex as positioning telescopes to visualize ancient stars, galaxies, black holes, and planets.
Our world is so complex and constantly fills me with new questions about myself and the universe at large. I hope to constantly question our universe and learn as much as I can. I doubt that I will know everything about the many secrets of our universe, but that is just something that I will have to come to terms with just as I have come to terms with the fact that 22% of my 223,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 nucleotides are cheating bastards.
