What is Science for?

It’s up to us what we do with knowledge

Science is often credited with taking the wonder out of life, but for me it unveiled the magic of existence. I ask myself: how can one learn of the workings of life and the universe and not touch into deeper reverence?

I’m a scientist, but I’m not a materialist. I view biology, the study of life, as an act of devotion. Life circumstances required me to take a step back from social media and creating for a while, and the space has allowed me to contemplate how I approach this practice and refine my intentions.

I want to dissolve the false boundary between science and spirituality. I want to dispel the false dichotomy between the scientific and the mystic. We can be both. I think that we need both, now more than ever.

Just like every other area of life, science is going through a chaotic transformation. Our collective narratives need to be challenged for us to change direction: from individualistic materialism and competition to interconnection and reciprocity. Science can serve this shift.

We were made to touch the ineffable, science is one of many ways to embrace the mystery.

One of the things I love most about studying bacteria and the microbiome is that it reveals the absolute interdependence of living beings and the limits of our perception. Humans especially need to be reminded of this as often as possible, in as many ways as possible, to counteract our strange idea of being separate from nature.

Waiting by Elena Stonaker (IG @elenastonaker)

Bacteria provide a prime example of how prejudice limits our thinking. As I often say, they are the foundation of all life. All life on this planet relies on the activity of these countless beings we cannot see: they cycle nutrients, provide plants with nitrogen so we and other animals can eat, they form communities in our bodies that we rely on for our health. And yet they are generally maligned and simplified to be ‘disease’, their almost incomprehensible diversity reduced to a monolith to be feared.

When we view bacteria with an open mind, we’re quickly humbled by their stunning capacity for innovation and their ability to form thriving communities that sustain every ecosystem on the planet. Humanity has so much to learn from them. But, to learn from our fellow earthlings we have to dismantle our assumption that we are somehow superior to other life forms, or that we are in any way separate from them.

A Creative Destructive Process

Scientific inquiry is a tool for systematically interrogating our ideas and perceptions. It is best engaged when underlying assumptions are recognized, so that they can be put to the test. This requires careful observation of our own thoughts and motivations when we enter into any practice of inquiry. It’s not about gathering facts that support pre-existing beliefs, it’s a tool to test our ideas. Like any tool, it’s up to us how we use it and what we build, or destroy, with it.

When engaged with an open mind and heart scientific study of life reveals Truth. To have a truly open mind, we must approach any exploration with a willingness, even a desire, to destroy our pre-existing beliefs and assumptions. This can be uncomfortable and disconcerting, but it is ultimately exciting and empowering to free ourselves from the limitations that come with faulty ideas. It’s a defining quality of liberation.

Leave behind any prejudice you have about science, and consider this: the knowledge generated through scientific investigations are a reflection of the society in which they occur. Scientific studies and findings are just as diverse as humanity itself, and the way the knowledge is used is a result of our cultural beliefs. It’s a tool that we wield for both destructive and creative endeavors.

There are possibilities for how we use our knowledge beyond narratives of hierarchy, separateness and control. Although science is often used to serve over-simplified narratives grounded in human dominance hierarchies (like ‘survival of the fittest’) that do not accurately describe how living systems function, it can just as easily be used to help us build a sustainable way of life that honors our interdependence with all life on the planet.

Knowledge is in the Eye of the Beholder

A curious thing happens when we take in knowledge: it exists in a kind of trinity. There is the knowledge itself, there is the one who receives it and becomes the knower, and there is how they relate to and interpret the knowledge, how it is known to them. So any scientific fact is filtered through a person’s beliefs and experiences and takes on a new life in how it fits within that person’s interpretation of reality. In this sense, knowledge transforms the knower and is itself transformed into the known.

This happens on a collective level too, when knowledge meets society. Consider DNA: humanity has known of its function as the coded instructions for life for less than a century, but it has dramatically changed how we talk about our health, and it has correctly been thought of as a tool to understand our traits and treat diseases. But, the thing that stands out to me most in popular discourse about DNA is that it’s largely human-centered and focused on narratives of control (eg. genetic manipulation). We hardly ever discuss the fact that the iconic double-helical structure, the way that it codes for proteins, works the same way in every single cell on this planet. The 3-base pair codes for each amino acid that make up proteins are the same in bacteria, in fungi, in plants, in fish, in birds, and in us.

Our discourse could just as easily focus on how this elegant polymer is a physical code that unites all life on Earth, and could be used to deepen our sense of kinship with all beings. The fundamental functions in our cells and in all living beings, even a banana plant, are the same. Changing our focus about the natural order will change our relationship to it.

When I was first learning of the mechanisms of life, it enhanced my feeling that plants and animals have innate wisdom to share with us. I didn’t think about how any of it could be manipulated to conform to human expectations. I just marveled at it, felt connected and alive in a way I hadn’t before. It helped me surrender and trust life itself. Phospholipids, metabolic cycles, the biochemical principles that underlie protein folding, the way life is sustained by all these processes in these small spaces we’ll never see directly awakened wonder in me.

The Roche biochemical pathways map. A fraction of the activity in every living cell.

The total workings of life are truly beyond our full comprehension, and certainly beyond our total control. In this very moment, there are hundreds of thousands of protein interactions driving each of your 30 trillion cells which are further supported by the activity of around 39 trillion microbes with their multitude of cellular activities within and between each other and your cells. Each animal and plant also has their own collection of genes, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids within billions or trillions of cells along with their own commensal microbes also containing a multitude of activities that are constantly transforming an untold number of molecules.

No words could ever do it justice. Learning what little we’re able to know and measure illuminates the divine mystery at play. That was how the knowledge became known to me. And there’s never been any conflict between my feeling that this is a way to witness the divine play and my work as a microbiologist. It’s possible to understand the mechanisms of life and feel that it all adds up to some ineffable thing beyond mechanism. None of this is random. Witnessing these mechanisms is witnessing our sacred interconnection, our union.

I admit that I always felt a bit odd though. It isn’t lost on me that many scientists don’t feel this way, and I’ve often felt a bit alien among my peers for many reasons (my race, my gender, my socioeconomic background) so until recently I’ve kept all this to myself.

Academic Mystic

The false dichotomy between science and spirituality is a strong cultural story, but it is just that: a story. One that should be shaken up to open our capacity to honor and trust life instead of control and exploit it. I want to amplify narratives about science that awaken us to our interconnection and expand our ability to sense the wisdom offered by every plant, insect and microbe.

I’ve found deep joy in discovering I’m not alone in this practice of uniting science and spirituality. It’s pretty well known now that Newton was an alchemist, and that many of the best academics, including Albert Einstein and Max Planck*, were also mystics. When motivated by curiosity, scientists seek to peer deeply into life. The mystery calls back to us and we heed it in countless ways. We emerge with a deep knowing that the material and the ethereal dance within us.

Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder. What happens when one of the great Buddhist teachers of our time encounters scientific knowledge? Thich Nhat Hanh recognized the accord between science and spirituality. His translation of the Heart Sutra, ‘The Other Shore’, is a shining example of how material science actually reveals timeless wisdom when held within an open mind and heart.

I leave you with these excerpts for contemplation:

As I look more deeply, I can see that in a former life I was also a cloud. This is not poetry; it is science.

I am made of earth, water, air, and fire. The water I drink was once a cloud. The food I eat was once the sunshine, the rain, and the earth. I am the cloud, the river, and the air at this very moment, so I know that in the past I was also a cloud, a river, and the air. I was a rock; I was the minerals in the water. This is not a question of belief in reincarnation; this is the history of life on Earth. We have been gas, sunshine, water, fungi, and plants. We were single-celled beings. The Buddha said that in one of his former lives, he was a tree, he was a fish, he was a deer. This is not superstition. Every one of us has been a cloud, a deer, a bird, a fish, and we continue to be these things today.

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In our observation of the cosmos, from the smallest elementary particle to a blade of grass, a river, a ray of sunlight, or a distant galaxy, what is static or unchanging? Our body is not static, it is a river made of cells, constantly flowing. And the cells in our body go through birth and death at every moment. So there is no self, there is no permanent soul, there is nothing unchanging, but there is continuation.

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As the French scientist Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) said, “Nothing is created, and nothing is destroyed.” This is exactly what the Heart Sutra is saying. Even the best contemporary scientists cannot reduce a speck of dust to nothingness. One form of energy or matter can only become another form of energy or matter. Something can never become nothing, not even the tiniest speck of dust.

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Biology and physics help us to remove our dualistic view of mind and matter, psyche and soma, so that we are able to see the reciprocal and interbeing connection between body and mind.

*Planck was in agreement with non-dualistic spiritual traditions like Kashmir Shaivism, he believed that consciousness was fundamental and that matter derives from consciousness.