My undergraduate degree was in Medieval Studies.
My professional masters degree was in Bioinformatics.
My current PhD studies are in Mammalian Genetics, emphasizing the overall physical structure of the genome.
The PhD and masters are fairly easy to relate to each other: Bioinformatics is a field that develops software and computational methods for examining and understanding biological data. Modern genetics often relies on people with these skills–while many labs can still focus intently on the workings of a single gene, if you want to understand how that gene interacts with the world, you can start generating a lot of data. A LOT. More than it would ever be feasible to process manually.
So, having a background in bioinformatics allows me to focus my work not on single genes, but on how the physical structures formed by DNA affects how genes are used. There’s 3 billion letters of DNA in the human or mouse genome, with thousands of genes, with thousands of mutations my project has cataloged, and tens of thousands of structural components to analyze along side them. If you were to randomly test each and every one of those three types of data against each other to blindly search for interactions, I calculated you’d have to run 371 trillion comparisons. My job started by trying to figure out how the fuck to pare that down to something manageable with the computing power I have, and I’m hopefully about to publish something damn cool on what I found in the process.
So, that’s genetics and bioinformatics. Sure, those fit together logically.
That’s where things get interesting. The professors at my university were very careful to teach you about the idea of the “historical lens”. When you read an old text or look at a painting, you’re viewing the subject matter through the lens of your own experiences and presuppositions about the world, and about the time period you’re studying. The person who wrote that text or painted that painting had their own lens, shaped by very different circumstances. Their natural focus is not going to align with your own, and you have to be aware of that. When you start forming ideas about your object of study, you have to ask yourself, “am I seeing what the creator of this piece intended to convey, or am I making assumptions based off of what I want to see?”
In essence, the core of what was taught in that Medieval Studies program was how to think about your own thinking.
And that is so fucking important for good science. “Am I drawing logical conclusions that are supported by the data, or am I just seeing this because I want to see it? Is there some test I can do to check if I’m wrong?”
It’s not easy. Sometimes it can be really uncomfortable, in fact. But it leads to more and better results in the long run, because those moments of self-reflection help uncover possibilities that you missed before.
…And that’s without getting into the seminar paper I wrote on the medieval understanding and treatment of head trauma, as a case study in the medieval period’s contributions to the development of science and technology. Because that was also a thing.
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