A purpose in life

In undergrad, my purpose in life was to compete against a set of friends and get better marks than them. This was no secret- I think this group and I became such great friends because each of us was trying to beat the other. Joys of attending a great college in India- life is very simple: marks are everything.

In grad school, my purpose initially was quite lofty: save the world from HIV. Then 3 years into my PhD project (yes, it took me that long for this realization): forget the world, just get some results... any results. But at least this project is marvelous. Couple more years: fine, this project is a piece of shit, give me a to-do list to graduate and I'll get that done. Final year: Oh God, may I never think about HIV ever again. My purpose became, get the hell out and never look back.

Let's fast-forward the postdoc years and now it's time to go back. What to do in India? During my off-moments, which I define as those when I feel I have accomplished nothing and I'm a terrible scientist with idiotic publications, I think I will shun research entirely. I will do something radically different, like start an orphanage or go about the country planting trees. Then I actually get around to doing a bit of research; I might analyze a placental RNAseq dataset, or stare at some DNA methylation data and then get highly excited. And think, hey, this isn't so bad after all.
So now, I've come to some sort of balance with my on- and off-selves. I will do research on stuff I like doing research on: no wet lab nonsense for me (even the thought of cell cultures and Western blots raises goosebumps and a need to vomit), but more of this sort of high throughput data analysis.

But everything needs meaning. No point in me staring at some numbers if it isn't going to be worth it- worth my time, worth some money and importantly, have a worthy answer to the question: how is this going to change anybody's life? It doesn't have to be a big change, but there has to be an impact.

Now I have a splendid research idea, dealing with obesity and my current favorite cell organelle, mitochondria (perhaps it's my favorite because I don't know much about it and have never worked on it, but that's a question to ponder another time). It is fairly novel, there's not too many labs in the world that will have the infrastructure to answer such questions (but my current lab is one of them, hurray), but does it have any point?

From a clinical angle, probably not. If I get any answers from my splendidly exciting question, nobody's life will be saved. But from a research angle? That's what a ton of background reading will tell me... some time, when I actually get around to it.

So this is my current purpose: figure out if question is worth asking and if yes, design a study; if not, modify.