Dear Science,
This is a love letter. But love is not uncomplicated. So bear with me as I discover my feelings for you as I write them down.
This is a love letter. Science, you captured me in third grade, when I was tossed into the accelerated gifted program based on a culturally biased and fairly arbitrary intelligence test that told my teachers I matched white norms of “smart.” I made papier-mâché planets and became infatuated by math despite being a girl – I mean, I even went to math competitions, and I won some of them. My privilege led me on a path of minimal resistance to you.
In high school, I was tracked to honors and then AP biology as the non-magnet half of my school was kept in traditional classes with apathetic teachers. With my blinders to the in-school segregation and systemic oppression on, I was enraptured by the way deoxyribonucleic acid defined us, and how we could change it. I remember the day I learned that our environment can physically alter the structure of our DNA within cells, and that those changes can be hereditary. A mother’s starvation could make her granddaughter eat and store food as if she did not know where her next meal would be coming from, even if she did. Our DNA remembers the trauma of our ancestors sometimes better than we do.
The first time I stepped into a research lab, I felt at home. Maybe it was the people; the people who made it such that I could take ten steps in any direction and find someone who would listen to my silly questions without hesitation or help me pick myself back up after a failed experiment. Maybe it was the idea of learning something new every day and still perpetually feeling as if I know nothing. Maybe it was the concept that not knowing an answer was okay – even exciting. Science, you are insensitive. You don’t care what I think my results should look like or how I feel. This may seem antithetical, but I find that to be one of your most charming qualities.
This is a love letter and science, you are insensitive and impersonal and data-driven, but you are not objective. You are a human construction; just one way of seeing the world; one way of knowing. I cannot leave my identity at your door. I am a scientist, but I am also a lesbian woman who comes from a family with no science or graduate education and didn’t know what a Ph.D. was before coming to college. I love you, but I cannot stop loving myself in pursuit of you and your toxic culture of misogyny, silence, manipulation, free labor, and over-exertion. May I suggest, while we are at it, being truly accessible? Letting everyone know you, such that we might one day have a genuinely scientifically literate society, where everyone is empowered to read graphs, interpret data, make papier-mâché planets, and love math?
This is a love letter because I have found you in the right light. It’s fluorescent and glassy and omniscient and intimidating and feels like home. You smell of latex and ethanol and freshly baked cookies left out on the counter for everyone to share. You have been made accessible to me through privilege, support, and a lot of luck. And yes, I feel lucky to know you so well. I hope more people from more places and different backgrounds can get to know you as I do – but that is on you (and us) to make a reality.
I know I cannot fix you, but I want you to be better because of me. Because I love you.
With admonishment and admiration,
Megan