While reading an article for journal club presentation I found a new scientific lover in the form of biofilms and their structures, functions, and effects to everyday life. This has happened to me before, but every time it is like falling in love again and again. You want to know all about the object of affection (stalk your crush on Facebook) and spend all your time with them.
Science works in same ways to an extent. You feel the need to do multiple internet searches on the topic. PubMed (search engine for scientific publications) suddenly becomes your most visited site. You spend hours better spent sleeping looking for new articles, pictures, statistics and research groups specializing in the topic. If you are lucky and get to actually do some research relating to this topic, you end up spending the incubation times (basically just waiting time) admiring the research material be it a culture of bacteria or theoretical model on computer. (Although one hopes that there is no need to cuddle with the research object unless it is a kitten).
This is probably one reason some scientists seem so weird to others. They are in their own world. And as true lovers of their topic they can't stop talking about the object of their affection. Everyone has had some form of obsessions as children. This is where the level of interest probably stems from. I will use myself as an example to point out the diversity of interests and that even scientist are just normal people with their intense obsessions. They just managed to make a career out of it.
Age 6-12:
Dinosaurs. The best thing ever! I still have a soft spot for prehistoric archeology due to this. It was very common interest for kids due to a movie called Jurassic park. They were large and varied in shape and habits and colors! Just like fairytale creatures, but with the added bonus of them actually being real! The first story I independently read was a short paragraph depicting tyrannosaurus Rex in a encyclopedia for kids. I am eternally grateful for my parents for taking me to several dinosaur related exhibitions. This must have been very boring to them.
Age 10-11:
Space. I had a little notebook filled with notes on planets and stars. Sadly I did not have a telescope at the time. This topic was short lived though as there was a very limited amount of information I could understand at the time from books.
Age 11-16:
Art. Creating own paintings and studying artists was a hobby for a long time. True artistic talent was not observed at any point. But still my mother got me all needed supplies and even took me once a week to art club for kids.
Age 10-12:
Egyptology. My interest in the era was rather intense. Books on this topic had lots of pictures and there was even a written language that was based on little pictures. Mysteries, politics, stories, curses and especially the peculiar way to store dead people was fascinating. My mother indulged me by taking me to another city to see an international visiting Egyptology exhibition. Culmination of this interest led me to read a book probably not suitable for a 12-year-old. A huge tome called Sinuhe the Egyptian written by Mika Waltari depicting life of an imaginary person called Sinuhe in Egypt in time of Pharaohs.
Age 14-17:
Plants as experimental organisms. This was a thing for every summer made possible by my fathers farming profession. I could get my hands on seeds actually used for food production and get advice for making them grow for experiments. I learned a lot about experimental design by making tons of mistakes. I obsessively recorded results on the poor plants watered with soap water and constructed a small chart of the results as my last plant related experiment.
Age 17-19:
Genetics and inheritable diseases. High school was a good time to get into some more serious topics. Looking at traits I have against the traits in my immediate family built on junior high and high school information that I found very narrow, with only animal and plant experiments introduced in any depth. I had the chance to get deeper into it in the form of a project in high school that took me via interviews to study the hereditary diseases in my family tree. All the encouragement from my family and relatives went far in obtaining information for the study.
The research project on hereditary diseases of my family tree in high school really defined all future plans heavily. A secondary career option in junior high had been an artist of some kind. This was abandoned in favor of more practical option of science that seemed exciting too. Also the support my parents gave me when I got really interested in a topic, played a big role in directing my career choices. They were amazing despite having no scientific background themselves par the everyday science in healthcare and farming.
Just like any profession based on passion, science contains taking intellectual risks, fighting for funding and getting things published, just like musicians and artists. It has an element of competition and performing at your limits and pushing those limits, just like any professional sports has. And it requires skills in managing people, money and time, just like leading a company does. This makes science an attractive and versatile career for anyone with intense interest in any topic and brings it closer to other professions too. All in all, scientific career is a way to harvest the obsessions of ordinary people for the common good.
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