Ben Paylor

Ben is one of the new guest authors for this blog. Like genegeek, he is using the blogging platform to improve his writing and overall science communication. Please welcome and encourage him!I’m a biologist who has at numerous times been irritated by genetics, dealing with it when I had to and always doing so with some degree of discomfort. From my first genetics course during my undergrad it seemed to be incredibly cluttered by a painful vernacular, it was systematic but not in a logical and mechanical way like the rest of biology which I loved so much, and it always seemed to be somewhat ambiguous to me (which was probably because I didn’t really understand, or try to understand it). This didn’t seem to get better as I trudged my way through my Masters, often visiting lectures praising how high-throughput things were becoming, and how everything was affecting everything, and various other facets of a distant field I kept telling myself I didn’t need or want to deal with. However, as a biologist, I began to be forced to deal with this discipline with increasing frequency, and through doing so things began to change. A career in scientific research requires that one be able to continually engage thing they don’t enjoy (closely related to “requiring that one continually do something they don’t enjoy”) and through this frustrating process of repetitive discomfort one learns to enjoy the things you wouldn’t normally enjoy. And then it gets to a point where you actually appreciate and get excited about the things that bothered your former uneducated self. And this is just one of those things, and my blog posts hopefully will explore this frustration/appreciation.