The Bowdoin Orient

I’m enrolled in Biology 212 this semester. It’s called “Genetics.” It should be called “Unlocking life’s mysteries: An exploration of why you have blue eyes even though neither of your parents do, why you should care about fruit fly pigmentation and pea pod textures, why you shouldn’t commit a crime if your brother has been arrested before, and how to argue with Supreme Court justices about patent law.”

I’m still searching for the most fitting title though. Genetics, you see, is not just about Mendelian inheritance, or the probability that you will develop a rare disease that affected neither of your parents but ailed your great-grandmother. Genetics is not fully encompassed by the superpowers of bacteriophage viruses, which can insert their own genetic material into foreign DNA and might help us beat cancer some day, nor by the acrobatic feats that our DNA sequences—wrapped up in chromosomes—can perform within our cells.

Genetics, I’m beginning to see, is politics. Genetics is ethics. Genetics is philosophy.  Before I go further, I have to give a shout-out to Professor Bateman, who has sparked my thinking on this by raising these issues alongside the relevant “hard science” during class lecture. 

On February 15, an article in the Orient titled, “Gender and women’s studies majors deserve your respect” really got me going.  Not because I disagreed with the authors’ argument, but because the story’s “grabber” grabbed me hard and I just couldn’t shake it.

“When you tell your friends that you’re a neuroscience major, they respect you.  Although they might not actually understand what you’re learning, they recognize its worth.”

I couldn’t decipher my indignation immediately (I’ll remind you here that I am a neuroscience major), but I felt some inexplicable injustice.“How dare you respect me for being a neuro major!” I thought.  “On what basis do I deserve ‘respect’ any more than other students here at this liberal arts institution where your major shouldn’t matter?”

But hold on, hold on—these are cool science books, written for theoretical physicists, amateur biologists, second-wave feminists and rubber fetishists alike. They’ll teach you, among many other things, how to survive falling 35,000 feet out of an airplane and why the penis is shaped like that. Like I said, cool science books.

We, liberal arts students of Bowdoin, postpone professionalism. We buy into the model that taking courses from a variety of disciplines doesn’t simply prepare us for a single career path, but aids us in acquiring the skills for “life long learning.” College is a time for self-discovery and development, we’re told—a time to find our passions, make mistakes, make friends, and hone skills that will follow us in whatever we choose to pursue. College isn’t all about the silent Russian film you happen to be analyzing, or the derivatives you happen to be taking. It’s about the mini life lessons hidden in these scholarly pursuits. One Tuesday night in Druckenmiller Hall, working in lab, I got one of those mini life lessons.