Wednesday, May 9, 2012

At the Molecular Level it doesn't really matter

I gravitate towards people naturally, or should I say people gravitate towards me… These are people I share my commute with, friends and acquaintances. Well, it was at the train station that I met Sujata. Sujata is a post doc microbiologist. She and I started chatting under the strangest of circumstances. It was a particularly miserable day as the heavens opened up, and the wind howled in our ears, and the local regional trains ran approximately twenty minutes behind schedule. As we huddled under the near non-existent structure at a university station called a concourse, I happened to open my purse to look for the train ticket when she spied the photograph of Guruvayoorappan in my purse. Instantly her Kerala instinct was roused, and she came to me and asked in Malayalam where I was from; to which I replied, from Mumbai.
She then looked at me pointedly and repeated the question again and so I had to give her the spiel about how I am not a Keralaite, but my hubby is and I think he is from ‘so and so’ place in Kerala. That seemed a more satisfactory explanation to her and she stopped quizzing me on my origin. Well twenty minutes elapsed and yet there was no sign of our trains, so we started talking about this that and the other. I asked her what she does, and she said she is a post doc working in the University's biology lab. So I asked her about her subject, her thoughts on the different species and her views on cloning of the sheep Dolly. She came up with this very profound response… She said, "You know at the molecular level it does not really matter, all organisms including humans are the same." Not being a microbiologist, I found this information strangely disconcerting. Since we are humans for some reason, we think we are unique because we are thinking beings; but ask scientists and they will tell you it does not really matter, that we are all made up of the same basic cell structure, not unlike Dolly - the sheep that was cloned.

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