Member SpotlightsThe Real Voyage of Discovery Monica Gianina Marcu, Pharm.D., Ph.D.  It is a beautiful, sunny morning. Through the opened window I can hear the glorious song of a bird who is blessing the day. At 17 I was still so envious of birds, I imagined they enjoyed the highest degree of freedom and happiness… Interrupting my daydreaming, the professor enters the class. Off we go, one of my favorite courses - Internal Medicine. She talks about heart disease and, strangely enough, I am worried again. I know the symptoms described, I must have had them myself! “Oh, come on, don’t start again,” I say to myself. But so goes the story, sadly, by the time I was in college I had endured so many illnesses that I could fit in “n” etiologies and was obsessed by them.I guess my health was the main reason behind the choice of a medical career. First, nursing school, then pharmacy school, and finally, since I still could not understand WHY people get ill, medical research. Years of “munching” and absorbing the wisdom and tribulations of modern science and its history (books on Koch or Pasteur’s lives), long lab hours of fervent search, frustration and joy were all called upon to answer the pivotal question: WHY do we become ill? After a while, I could understand how kinases spark the cell’s functional processes, how genes encode the color of my eyes, how wicked viruses invade our precious bodies, and many more bits and bytes of fragmented biological knowledge. But, strangely enough, nobody instructed me on how to take care of my own health. Worse, I viewed myself now as an entangled, indecipherable collection of zillions of minute biological mechanisms, threatening to give up proper functioning at any time. What a pathetic self- image! It is a beautiful, clear night. Up here, in the mountains, the stars look so close that I am almost afraid that they will fall upon me. I should get some sleep in the tent if I could only mobilize my legs (exhausted after the long hiking day) to lead me to it. But the moment felt so precious that I indulged in recalling all the beauty I enjoyed today: the glacial lakes, the mountain flowers spiking the trail, the dense forest, and above all, the wolf. It was far enough, but through the 300mm lens I looked straight into his eyes. I could never forget his yellow, clever eyes looking to and through me. The whole week was wonderful. I have taken hundreds of pictures inspired by the surrounding colors and harmony. Nature was so fulfilling, so penetrating and pure, I never felt better and stronger. I was part of this and nature was within me. I could have been a tree with deep roots, right there, on the slopes, never having to leave them anymore. In time, I turned to nature to learn about life, true and living. Before I thought I could study life from (the point of view of) plastic tubes and dishes and be content. But when I left the walls to spend time looking closely at flowers and wildlife, learning nature’s eternal rules, I gained two things: my health improved tremendously and I became a photographer. In other words, I got my life back and learned to see at the same time. I wish I could describe why I felt so incomplete before. What have Nature and art brought to my personal and scientific life, besides a lot of soul searching and redefining decisions? For those people of few words, I can summarize it as BALANCE. For those who can stand 10-minutes divorced from deep scientific thoughts, I will share my secret with you. One day, after much indoor, “in tube” research on life, my deepest “bio-ego” revolted herself. She forced me to reflect on science trends and traps, on how I was conceiving hypotheses or felt (un)satisfied about the results of the passing day. I was very sure that something important was missing from my life and was unhappy. The image of the WHOLE was missing, LIFE, in its own sanctity and immense beauty was not the source of my curiosity. I did not understand or revere the interconnection of all living forces, but I was beginning to feel the need to, the more I evaded into the woods. In the past, people mostly lived in the countryside. Of the land, they were connected with nature and evolved with its vicissitudes. They were outdoor creatures. The greatest thinkers, artists, philosophers, writers all were known to spend days roaming through the forests in search of inspiration and solitude, inquisitively searching for answers or observing the way of the trees and insects. Is it true or legend that a dragonfly inspired the helicopter; symphonies were composed on a skylark’s song? Life could not be conceived apart from nature, health and vitality were sought there and even science was inspired by nature - remember the falling apple? Sure, all that beauty immersion could not have left the sensitive souls of searchers untouched, no, they had to capture and immortalize it somehow. Arts were the tools: subjective, unrepentant to equation, but sublime. Many scientists were accomplished artists of some sort. Intuitively maybe, they must have felt the need to develop a harmonious (intellectual-artistic, reasoning-feeling) mastering of their brains. I believe it is a most human need and unarguably inborn right. But we slowly lost it, another silent victim of the city’s cacophonic trepidation. That is why I have to leave cars and buildings behind in order to find my own self again, to regain my intuition and creativity. I go to the forest and take my camera with me. Then I bring back my view of nature and its harmonious, living structures. Once my artistic alter ego is satisfied, the scientific curiosity strikes me again: by inertia or not, I start to read and research about the lives of my subjects, in the wild. Which way will allow me to find out more: the way of the thinking or the way of the looking? Reasoning or feeling? In a perpetually arguing dialog the two paths of knowledge are trying to win me over. But I am not easy to conquer, they will have to convince me over and over as I cannot get satisfaction by employing just one of them. I still wonder how I ever could before. And now, stop to reassess the way most of us were trained to learn, reason and perceive the world around us. Are we using ALL of our senses in the process of cognition or discovery? How do we find the concepts with which to work? Who defines the world and who defines the definitions for us? Howard Gardner considered that human intelligence could be classified into seven types: artistic, kinesthetic, mathematic, musical, linguistic, interpersonal and intra-personal. Which are the intelligence tools we were instructed to use during our research? See if you can answer this question for yourself. I believe it is important. “Stay close to Nature and its eternal laws will protect you” became my favorite motto. If biologists would remember that forests increase their fruit crop in the seasons preceding a tough winter (thus offering extra support for wild life), maybe there would be less reductionist genetic (and now proteomic) determinism in biology. After taking pictures of wildlife I went on to learn about the incredible ways by which wolves regulate their offspring production and their whole life cycle (hormones, behavior – therefore proteomic patterns, right?) according to the number of deer and other wolves killed in their territory. I believe that the perception of this information and the biological adjustment to it are not rooted in genes and proteins, but in the extraordinary intelligence of nature. Genes and proteins come into play afterwards, as physical sensors and executors. When we “listen” to and become aware of this “informational field”, if only intuitively at first, we become much closer to understanding life and many diseases. I have humbly enrolled myself in this “workshop” and am thrilled. It is about wholesome knowledge. We do not have the tools to study all aspects and regulation of life yet, but it is not always the tools that count the most. It is also the approach and beliefs we held. What if we were taught the wrong “facts” and presumptions, therefore we build now on fake grounds? “Nothing is as firmly held as what man knows least,” Montaigne said. What made me (with the same genes and proteins) a healthy organism again? Something beyond genes and proteins, something that is within me that I learned how to acknowledge and employ. Something that is in any living creature that can be felt and deserves to be worshiped. And it is more obvious in the wilderness than anywhere else. There, the beauty of creation is so overwhelming and humbling that one cannot stop painting it in songs or pictures. I cannot stop wandering and absorbing it, cannot put my camera down. Back to the basic science, I see my lab results in a very different light, with much less arrogance. I see myself now as a wholesome, creative creature but still, just another one among the myriad of organisms who cannot stop birthing more life. I know that, in order to remain healthy, I have to play according to the Rules of Nature. These rules tell me clearly, no need to spend millions on the search, that cows should not be fed meat, they were conceived to eat grass. Otherwise they might become “mad”. It’s not the prions, it’s us! I should keep on moving and eat little but clean, so I can foster a vigilant immune system. The less “foreign” chemicals and have less allergies. The more harmony - the less depression. Try to break the laws of life, and diseases spring out from their vicious Pandora’s box. I say it’s wonderful to research life, but we should never distance ourselves from the true, living life. Observing nature is the greatest tool we have. Like an artist, a scientist should find his/her own style and “create” as much as possible a personal view on life. Sophisticated techniques will never surpass the original mind or keen eyes who see beyond the obvious, just as the best lenses or most exotic places will not help a photographer who has nothing within to express. I find it refreshing and inspiring that a man of letters, Proust, put it so well for both artists and - I believe – scientists: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in developing new eyes.” ### Dr. Marcu is a Research Fellow at the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. Her primary research interests focus on cellular stress in cancer and signal transduction and the pharmacological intervention in cellular stress including the therapeutic manipulation of chaperones. She is a published artist and photographer, and her work is featured in numerous art galleries in the USA and the UK. Her website is photomarcu.com. Dr. Marcu has been a member of The Science Advisory Board since April 2002. ### << Previous Next >> [ View All Member Spotlights ] |
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