Hurray! For the first time in my LIFE, I've added a picture to my blog entry! A giant leap indeed!
I like this picture because the man and the woman are so graceful about whatever it is that they are doing (sowing seeds?) and are so in sync. It's like an ideal to live up to or a fantasy to build: Ram and I doing day to day chores in a serene, coordinated, uncomplicated dance.

The reason I wanted to figure this image-in-a-blog business out is because I have a dream. You know those cooking recipe books with step by step pictures on them? I want to create a recipe book about protocols in science. Imagine- western blots, ELISAs, PCR! Everything that seems horrible and complicated to the lay person suddenly laid out in a neat, demystifying set of pictures.

Think of the advantages:
Next time you get a test result for something from the clinic, you'll know how exactly those results were obtained and then it is no longer as bewildering or as set in stone (because you know the drawbacks of that particular method) when you discuss them with a doctor.
Or suddenly, you realize, most of science is really exactly like cooking. You need a healthy dose of common sense and a bit of an adventurous spirit and you should be willing to take your results in a philosophical manner.

Science education has to be made more fun. People should WANT to do laboratory science and not be intimidated- regardless of what comic books say, it is really, really hard to get an explosion in the laboratory if you mix a bunch of random things together... especially in a biomedical laboratory. More than fear, I think it is boredom that puts people off science- who the heck thinks a bespectacled guy in a white coat is interesting? And have you noticed, all the educational videos in school teaching you how to titrate acids or identify cations/anions or even something as spectacular as cardinal birds mating will have the most boring voice-over in the world. "The male approaches the female and performs a mating dance to attract her attention" intones the voice. How clinical and sterile!

I shall begin by making this recipe book of science. This, by its nature and by my own inexperience, will be meant for people with some knowledge of laboratory science. Then, the world of science education will suddenly open up and I can start working on making science a fun thing for people of all ages.


*** Post script: Apparently, there is a journal out there (Journal of Visualized Experimentation) that has the same purpose, only it is for scientists and not lay people. So, the first part of Le Grande Plan is already complete. Now I shall think about how to put these in a nice enough way for kids and non-science people to read and like it****