Rambling

My nonexistent statement from last week:

I am using the bacterial model organism Escherichia coli to study gene pairs thought to be associated with cell death mechanisms. We are trying to elucidate the role these gene pairs play in cell survival and/or cell death, because explicating this mechanism will help us to better understand those processes that underlie programmed cell death, an important process that is altered in many diseases, including cancer.

In all honesty, very few outside of microbiology - probably very few outside of my specific area of research - will actually care about what I'm studying. If this is the case, why should we even consider doing research?

Science is such a multifaceted entity, that it would be nearly impossible to broaden one’s research focus beyond one or two specific questions, without completely losing sight of your purpose. We have been shown over and over again that despite the enormous amount of understanding we have gained about how the universe works, we really know very little. There is still an infinite amount of information to be learned and re-learned.

We often take basic research for granted, waving off the research endeavors undertaken by universities and governmental institutions like the National Institutes of Health, in favor of a new way to do a home self-genetic test or that new anti-aging supplement promised by the biotech industry. But without basic research, applied science would never be possible. It’s like trying to build a skyscraper from the top down – the building won’t stand without a firm foundation.

So, to finally get to the point, what I’m proposing is an advocacy project for the general public that shows the necessity of basic research facilities and how the information we obtain from these endeavors can be advantageously utilized in the applied sciences, using my own research as an example. I can’t go into more detail right now, as my ideas are all over the place, but this should cover the gist of what I’m trying to do (hopefully). It seems, though, that some sort of documentary would be most appropriate for the purposes of this project - maybe a small database documentary.