The Model Kit

At 45 years of age, I’m looking back and reflecting on the fact that I’ve spent most of my adult life in academia. I’m not sure whether I should find this surprising. I feel like I’m suited to it, but things could have turned out very differently. I always did exceedingly well on standardized tests, but in the end, I barely graduated high school. Sometimes people offer excuses on my behalf: “You were just bored.” Well, sure, but that was not the fault of the subjects I was studying or the teachers or the curricula. The fault was mine for not applying myself to the material and finding, creating, an interest in it. I can give my younger self a little slack and note that I was also clinically depressed throughout high school. Regardless, the fact is I was not looking like college material by the end of it.

Instead, I enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks and got a traveling construction job for a year or so. The work was hard, but mostly unskilled, physical labor. I enjoyed it because it allowed my mind to wander freely for most of the day while my body was on autopilot toting concrete blocks off wooden pallets and building retention walls with them. But it wasn’t long before I decided that this wasn’t the life I wanted, and that my last chance at turning things around was to join the Army, have some adventures, and leave with the GI Bill college money that was on offer.

My misadventures in the Army are a whole anthology worth of stories for another time. After I did my four years, I came home and enrolled in Pasco Hernando Community College. I was still gung-ho from the military so I set myself to the hardest goal I could think of: I would get on the pre-med track, go to medical school and become a doctor. I had to start at the bottom with remedial math courses, and I got a taste of science with intro to biology and was hooked. We learned about Darwin and Mendel and the discoveries that led to the early theory of evolution and common descent. Although I was not terribly religious, I was disturbed by the materialist implications of evolution and the firmness with which it seemed to close the door on much of the supernatural. I read Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species determined to find a fatal flaw in his reasoning and refute Darwinism. Instead, I emerged from that task with a profound respect for the scientific process and a new fascination with the natural world.

After two years of community college, I gained admission to the University of Florida and declared a major in chemistry. Why chemistry and not biology, I can’t say. Because it wasn’t until I got to UF and took organic chemistry-that dreaded destroyer of majors, that pitiless weed-out course that the medical schools rely on to do their dirty work and thin the application pool-that I fell in love with chemistry. Biology was my first love, but it was the chemistry in biological systems that really interested me. The funny thing is that at the introductory level, chemistry is rather dry and boring, while biology is a treasure trove of fascinating wonders. But at the professional level, research in biology seems as dry as it gets, while professional level chemical research is dynamic and exciting. But of course, that’s my opinion. I’m a chemist!

During my first semester at the University of Florida, I was spending my days wandering among the Collegiate Gothic architecture from one lecture hall to another, thinking of all the things in the world to there are to study, and I said to myself, “I could do this forever.”

(to be continued…)