So in my blog today I’m not going to be covering necessarily a biochemistry concept in terms of covalent bonds or interactions or pKa’s or the like, but rather a process that we all got familiar with on Wednesday night and that we, as potential future biochemists, will probably encounter often in our respective fields. I am talking about the process of solving puzzles and the art of making inferences!
Solving puzzles is not unique to biochemistry, obviously. I will argue, however, that biochemical puzzles are one of the most satisfying scientific puzzles to solve, simply because we have an amino acid alphabet to work with, which is a little more tangible than say, quarks or antimatter and other things of which we don’t actually understand the physical makeup. At least for amino acids, we know what they are supposed to look like, chemically and physically!!
In the review session, we spent ample time on some of the problems trying to piece together the results of various protease assays to determine the peptide sequence. This reminded me so much of scavenger hunts I used to play as a kid or programmes I used to watch on TV (Wheel of Fortune, Hangman, etc) — except this was one better! Because we were not trying to guess and anticipate words, which is delicious in a different way, but rather we were using our biochemical knowledge of each protease’s tendencies and cutting signatures to construct a logical sequence. I was also reminded of newspaper rooms before printing day, when the editors would cut out pieces and segments of stories to form, quite literally, a coherent story, a logical flow of ideas and articles.
As we were all enjoying the puzzles from the worksheet, I began to think a little quasi-profoundly, “Aha! So this is why I have always been drawn to science!” I really am not kidding about that, haha. Science is satisfying. At its core there is a cause-and-effect relationship between every experiment you run. Although you might not understand everything in the realm of science, if you possess enough logic, you can make inferences, and use those inferences to make a logical construction of a guess. At the end of the day, it really is just a satisfying process, and to me nothing is more desirable than the feeling of satisfaction.