This is a start of my periodic ongoing conversations on this website, which will hopefully widen the understanding of my readers of some of the thoughts and points of view that I hold, and which continue to sustain my life professionally as well as a writer.
A conversation is different than simple exchange of information. In our society today we are primarily focused on such rapid exchanges of information in ‘sound bites’ for speech. We look for one sentence of better yet a phrase for answers on Google or elsewhere, we text abbreviated messages and find ourselves impatient with long sentences in writing.
Writing scientific papers is just a longer version of concise delivery of information. We pose a question or a hypothesis and design experiments to find a product or test this hypothesis. After gathering data with care and controls, only then we allow ourselves to specifically interpret the data within the context of the questions asked. In modern day biological sciences, with enormous data banks and rapid methods for analysis of large numbers of samples this process is sometimes reversed simply by computerized data mining.
In “Uncharted Journey from Riga”, I have tried to portray the personal joy (and frustration) of a historical period in Molecular Biology spanning the last half of the 20th century. A period when finding answers to biological questions required ingenuity and long hours at the bench in a laboratory. It was also a unique time when novel results could be achieved in in a small laboratory with a few participants. It was a time before ‘big breakthroughs’ required ‘Big Science’ with dozens if not hundreds of contributors. However, the personal joy of discovery remained very special, even if not described in the ‘Discussion’ or ‘Conclusions’ of a published paper.
In later years as a writer, it became a challenge to change from strict informational writing to something more, that would include the human emotions of situations and events to being described.
I hope that the “Uncharted Journey from Riga” depicts both factual events of the past and the emotional milieu through all those years.
Ilga B. Winicov Harrington, Ph.D.
