What We Don’t Know

When I was a freshman in high school, taking biology for the first time, it seemed like an endless list of facts.  When we learned about specific scientists and their discoveries it was Leeuwenhoek, Mendel, Darwin–these men have been dead for a century or more.  The most contemporary discovery covered in the usual high school biology text is Francis and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s structure in 1953.  I assumed that the lack of news for the past 50 years meant that there was nothing new to report, which meant that we knew all we needed to know about biology.

Yeah, I was wrong-o.

Of course, it was in college that I learned the extent of the stuff we don’t know.  I mean, good god, we still don’t completely understand the human body and disease, so grasping large systems like whole ecosystems or the global ecosystem–yikes–it’s overwhelming.

I think that what we don’t know about science is sometimes more interesting than what we do know.  It’s so mysterious: we may not even even know what we don’t know.  New discoveries answer 1 question and raise 100 more. We will never know everything about everything, and thank goodness for that.  I hope scientists for millennia to come will keep finding deep, meaningful questions to investigate.

Viva science!