I hardly remember if a day went past in my life, when I did not have a conversation about something sciencey. Like it happens in every Indian family, even I was told to either become an engineer or a doctor. I was interested in neither. What intrigued me rather is figuring out things on my own. I would rather destroy our garden by building tiny rivers and dams. Or I would prefer to make my own telescope and look at stars. But what excited me the most was to watch the ants. How they behaved? Or how they recognized which one is sugar powder vs salt.

When the time came, I was forced to take exams to enter med school. I rarely made it to any examination hall and rather called my friends to go watch movies. Eventually, people forced me to take IT. I went to college for few days. Seemed like I was topping all programming courses with no effort. It was boring, so I dropped out. What still would tickle the kid in me was sci if movies. Like can you really create T virus? How can you splice different genes to bring dinosaurs back to life, like in Jurassic Park. How do you connect brains and share dreams like Nolan's Inception.

The strangest point in my life was that my college got the IT companies to hire biotechnologists. Like why did I waste four years reading Albert's cell biology if this is what is on the table. I rather chose to appear for nationwide exams to join grad school. And this is what got me into PhD in biology. After clearing mutiple exams, and multiple interviews over many places, I had a chance to pick institute of my choice. More specifically lab of my choice. My first two rotations were in neuroscience labs followed by the final one in a wound healing lab. And the last one got my attention.

Do you know that even cancers can be modeled as overheating wounds. Most chronic diseases you know of have some sort of overscarring aka fibrosis associated with them. According to TA Wynn about 45% of mortality, globally, can be associated with fibrosis eventually causing failure of some organ. And what do all fibrosis have in common? A cell called fibroblasts, an activated fibroblasts to be more precise. So while in normal healing the activated fibroblasts are deactivated or removed via apoptosis they remain chronically activated in pathological conditions.

So I began looking at the reasons for this chronic activation. The biomechanics and heterogeneity in mechanical responses of these cells in the same population. So this technically makes me a cell biologist now.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9574

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/15419061.2013.854778

http://www.keystonesymposia.org/index.cfm?e=Web.Meeting.Program&Meetingid=1457

Well, apart from actually doing experiments in the lab, I love to communicate science. I used to do that on Facebook within the groups I hanged around in. Then while searching for some topic in cryptography, I landed in steemit. And I was like what the hell. There is a blogging platform based on blockchain where people talk science. And here I am. I specifically enjoy reading and writing posts under science and steemSTEM tags.It is a wonderful community on steemit who supports people who write good science content.