This post was originally written to be a 5-minute Science Slam on May 17th, 2018.

-9 months old

I was part of a science experiment 9 months before I was born and it went far better than statistically likely. I was conceived in a petri dish. A “test-tube baby”. Which is a misleading name, since the egg and sperm are actually combined in a petri dish, not a test tube. The first human baby born from in-vitro fertilization was in 1978, but even in 1993 success rates were still less than 25% percent. But thanks to science and a lot of luck, here I am!

2 years old

I didn’t talk until after my second birthday. Not a single word. I didn’t sleep either. I would just sit there staring out at the world. Observing. My parents were obviously very worried. They took me to a speech doctor to check if I was deaf or mute. “No”, said the doctor, “she’s just waiting until she has something to say”.

5 years old

When I was 5, we grew monarch butterflies from eggs. I rapidly became the most obnoxious 5-year-old at the park. “Look at all those cocoons”, exclaimed Tabitha, “soon there will be butterflies everywhere”. “Well actually”, said 5 year old me, “cocoons turn into moths. A caterpillar that becomes a butterfly makes a chrysalis”.

12 years old

When I was 12, I had a pet mould named Milson. Milson started as a seed growing project, but sealed in a plastic bag, Milson’s multi-coloured fungal form began to emerge from the seemingly dormant soil.  For my science fair project that year, I grew mound on different types of bread to study the effect of preservatives. I was on the lookout fuzzy Penicillium, which is also used to make penicillin and blue cheese. The most fascinating thing to me was that the mound didn’t come from within the bread. The source spores are ever-present in the air all around us, just waiting for a nice moist bread host to land on.

16 years old

We all know photosynthesis: sunlight + carbon dioxide + water makes sugar + oxygen. Duh.

But wait.

“You’re telling me particles of light travelling from the sun come in and hit a protein within chloroplast, making it lose an electron, which then gets passed down a chain of other proteins, all the while protons are being pumped across the membrane to build up an electrochemical gradient that powers ATP Synthase, the most incredible machine on earth!? And wait a second, did you just refer to light as having both momentum AND a wavelength! And it’s the absorption spectrum of these light particle-waves that leads to me seeing plants as green! WHAT?!”

It was then that I realized.

The world is A LOT more complicated, fascinating, and beautiful than I had been led to believe by these colour-coded flow charts.

18 – 21 years old

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Petri dish, butterflies, photosynthesis. She is going to study biology.” Oh no. I studied biophysics. Because I was terrified of how chaotic biology seemed.

For my thesis, I applied suction to a glass tube thinner than a human hair to catch onto the tails of teeny tiny worms. And because the glass tube was so thin, we could measure its deflection to get the nano-Newton forces exerted by the worms swimming in different viscosities. We wanted to know how the worm adjusted its swimming in different environments and found they maintain a constant power output independent of viscosity. Fascinating!

But is this what I want to spend my life doing? Catching microscopic worms by the tail?

22 years old

I did my masters in computational biophysics. Did you know we can use computers to solve complicated mathematical equations allowing us to explore the fundamental physics of the biological machines found inside all living cells that drive the chemical reactions keeping us alive? Now you do.

But it turns out I liked telling people about my research a lot more than actually working on my project. And when it came time to decide if I was going to stay on for a fully funded, fancy schmancy PhD…

I said no. And I left.

24 years old

Since I left research, I’ve been having a bit of an identity crisis. Am I still a scientist?

I have two degrees with the word science in them, but what does science even mean?

Science is not a collection of facts, flowcharts, and functions describing some physical system. It is a process, a mindset, an approach to learning that demands critical thinking, analysis of existing evidence, creativity, and beyond all else, an openness to reconsidering what we believe to be true.

I find comfort in this definition because it means that no matter what I end up doing when I grow up, I’ll always be a scientist. After all, my life is one big experiment that started in a petri dish.