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In an academic discipline I naively assumed to be completely cut and dry, quantitative, this course has opened my eyes even more to the way science works. Part of the reason I was drawn into science is because so much of it is quantitative – we measure things, and from those things we can draw conclusions about the way things work. At the same time, biology, neurobiology even more so, has this other indefinable facet that seems to mean something different to all of us.

Our continuing discussion on animal models was an important one for me as a scientist, and it’s now something I think about each time I go into lab. I find myself struggling to really make sense of this (evolutionary) animal hierarchy we perpetuate. I believe that research that will ultimately benefit us as humans is worth it, but I’m having a hard time untangling that from what may just feel morally okay because it’s what I grew up with. In the same vein, I think this feeling has also come up in many discussions – like Elliot mentioned with psychotropic drugs. How much of my initial disagreement with drugs as therapeutics comes from the culture I was raised in? And how much of my change of mind comes from a “backlash” of that upbringing? Again, in a broader sense, why do I have these specific moral beliefs in the first place and what to extent (and how) can they change with age, culture, experience?

Maybe the thing I’m leaving this seminar with is the knowledge that these questions may never be completely answered – at least not for each of us. The beauty of biology, I think, is the fact that such concrete (in my mind) facts about how we work will never tell the whole story. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue this knowledge, and it sure won’t stop me from doing so, but I think there’s an inevitable wall we’re going to hit. If we could really use molecular biology to explain consciousness and morality and the power of the brain, I think it would speak to the simplicity of our species. Our intricacies outnumber our abilities as an organism to explain them – and I think that’s pretty cool.