So here is the [almost] most up-to-date version of the Specialist Subject piece - which I will be using for my first assessment. I have yet to apply any changes to it following last week's workshop but from what I remember, I got a rather mixed response to it, some good and some bad (or rather, constructively critical). Needless to say, it's still going to be undergoing further changes so watch this space.
This whole world is steeped in science. You cannot
take a step or a breath without interfering with some unseen life force, like
vibrating a thread on the universal spider’s web. Stepping out one day on a
brisk Winter morning with the expectation of being drenched by the rain, I was
pleasantly surprised to be met with the contrary – zenith blue skies bathed in
sun, and the pavements exuding their acidic scent post pluviam. But I was in no way spared my saturation, for I was
still weighed down, like a sponge heavy with water, with that unseen life
force: science.
I just so happened to be heading towards the campus
medical centre, which got me thinking about science. Not the physics which
carries an apple from its tree to a patch of unforgiving concrete below. Not
the chemistry which causes it to bruise in contact with said concrete. What I
considered was the biology which guides the fly to the rotten core to lay its eggs.
The living rice grains which boil forth are not something which many people
would wish to go near with a ten-foot barge pole – I, myself, have often gagged
when finding them carousing in the ripe juices at the bottom of a dustbin – but
I have continuously found myself in awe of biology’s visceral intricacies and
miracles in all their stages, from conception to dissolution. In this instance,
I was only thinking about what could be wrong with me. Acidic taste in the mouth. Was it acid reflux? Food poisoning?
Dehydration? I never usually got sick thanks to the strength of my immune
system so it was kind of a big deal. It made me wonder just how resilient my
insides actually were.
Faced with a dark clammy lump of meat on a tile and
a scalpel as a teenage biologist, I had felt little in the way of excitement to
carve it open and see what lay within. The resemblance was closer to the repast
of a cannibalistic surgeon than a clinical classroom experiment. In my gloved
palm, its cold solidity and disembodiment unnerved me, while the rancid odour
of meat emanating from it seemed to bloom in my nostrils. I took a step back.
It wasn’t that I was squeamish or averse to the sight of blood. I’d watched the
daily decomposition of a mouse’s corpse from inanimate ball of fur to scattered
bones with an almost poetic reverence; there was no poetry in this – until cloven
open by a less reluctant hand. Here was an object I could put a title to. This pulsating
fist-sized engine was possessed of chambers webbed with fibrous white tendons,
muscular vermillion walls, aorta and vena cava protruding like fleshy straws
from a thin cloak of fat. The lid had been lifted. Seeing this heart laid bare
had instantly rendered the human body more beautiful than the textbook diagrams
had led me to imagine.
Where before, the pruned labyrinthine mass of the
cranial lobes resembled a rainbow crash helmet, now it was more a large and
vulnerable pickled walnut. The chest cavity undulated with the swell of delicate
coral branches and flesh curtains pressing against their white prison bars,
instead of simply two misshapen pink balloons swollen with bunches of grapes. Then
came the discovery that we somehow managed to compress thirty feet of digestive
tract – from top to literal bottom – into our ninety inch torsos and wrapped it
all up in twenty-one square feet of skin (enough to stretch across your
doorway). Meanwhile, each and every cell of that body was engaged in inexorable
and ever-diminishing renewal. I felt exhausted just reading it!
Unfortunately, as a result of that large pickled
walnut, humanity has adopted an inflated ego which compels us to assert
ourselves as the most superior life form, intellectually more advanced and so
forth; an asset which we proceed to laud over the rest of the world like a shameless
post-Eden Adam. However, upon closer inspection, Adam can be viewed as no more
than an upright hairless ape with a censor button, which led me to wonder: how big does our ego really need to be?
An animal such as the duck-billed platypus is, in form, virtually unchanged
from creatures which existed 110 million years ago, yet thrives to this day. Even
several fish, such as sharks, and other water-dwelling creatures like the
horseshoe crab and leech-like lamprey, have undergone very little change from
their prehistoric ancestors. If we are truly the superior species, then why has
it taken us so long to get here? It was at this point that I started to doubt
the value of intelligence.
In order to see where else the human design is
failing, I turned to the microscopic. Allow me to introduce the Tardigrade or
Water Bear. An immensely resilient invertebrate, no bigger than a full stop,
this minute creature is capable of surviving at temperatures approaching absolute
zero or exceeding boiling point (and you thought you had it rough when the
air-con stopped working on the ‘hottest day on record’). Even when bathing in
solar radiation or crushed in a celestial vacuum, these tiny teddy bears are
seemingly indestructible, leaving us, as a species, kissing their infinitesimal
toes in respect. Inevitably, like the children that we are, we begin to mimic
such adept creatures through biomimetics. The humble though irritating burr,
for example, inspired George de Mestal’s Velcro, while the properties of sharkskin
are being tested as a defence against bacteria.
I pondered if such a thing could work on my throat
as I returned home. I didn’t get an appointment that day (surprise, surprise),
but I’d been told to call back tomorrow. I listened to the dull rhythm of my
footsteps, like a metronome, like a pulse. Some may choose to segregate
themselves from their primal past by ignoring the world’s biological drumbeat,
force it to fade in the face of chemical advancements and greater steps in
space than anyone has taken before. But when we owe our current victory to the
successes of that past, then that drumbeat should be impossible to ignore as it’s
beating inside our own heads.
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