It seems that in every collection of college essays, there is at least one about a young, hard-working student who decides, flying in the face of his parents’ dreams, to abandon accelerated biology and the path to medical school—and become, instead, a writer. I think it is time to address the reverse.
Writing has been a priority for me since I mastered holding a pencil. Earlier than that, even, if you consider the careful composition of thoughts in the mind of a 3-year-old to be writing, which, during my preschool days, I believe I did. I wrote constantly, edited incessantly, tutored peers in middle school, took accelerated classes in prep school, and signed up for a creative-writing workshop when I got to Stanford. I was eager to list author as my profession on my tax returns. I was prepared to be a starving artist. My relationship with the English language was ideal: fun, exciting, worth the effort—and then I got involved with chemistry.
This transition is something that does not make sense to a great number of people. I am one of those people to whom it makes no sense. So I will do what writers do, that is, make an analogy vaguely reminiscent of the original topic at hand, step back, dust myself off, and hope that metaphor works its illuminating magic and makes everything clear. My comparison, in this case, is Virgil. Brace yourself.
The Virgil analogy springs from a bunch of people insisting to me that organic chemistry is “just a lot of memorization.” What I am thinking is, maybe those people did not take organic chemistry.
Chemistry is a language, yes, and learning a language does involve memorization. You need to learn the words (the compounds), the grammar (how they interact), and the canon of accepted and commended work (those amazing reactions that other people came up with). But no one would confuse vocabulary study with fluency. No one ever tries to tell you that reading Virgil is “just a lot of memorization.” A trained monkey could memorize things (okay, that’s a stretch, but I’m making a point here). A trained monkey could not, however, translate Virgil à la Robert Fagles. Nor could that monkey design total syntheses of complex, three-dimensional, organic molecules, carry out those syntheses, and make practical applications of the products. When they make a monkey that can, I will switch to biology, and then you can read another one of these essays.
In my time at Stanford, I’ve concluded that chemistry is not all that different from creative writing in the end. When you write, or rather, when you rewrite endlessly in the hopes of betterment, you ask yourself questions: Will this phrase work if I take out the adverb? Is this the shortest, most efficient way to get my point across? Would a different verb improve the cadence? Can I reverse the order of the sentences?
You do the same thing in chemistry: If I take off a functional group, will this molecule still bind properly? Can I cut out steps to make a more efficient synthesis? What about using a different protecting group? In what order do I need to construct this compound? The modes of thinking are not dissimilar, nor is the trial-and-error, the governing body of existing work and (and this is what appeals to me most) the sense of a receding end line.
Through such comparisons I have come to understand my love for science in that certain, subtle light that is generally the illuminating property of philosophy and literature. Where others see rules and numbers in chemistry, I see entropy, second drafts and the creative process I had hitherto found only in Nabokov, Ovid or Kierkegaard. When, during a class in Eastern religions, I tried to explain Nirvana as the chemical state of dynamic equilibrium, the pieces started falling into place.
Yes, that is another analogy. If it bothers you, and if, like those same people who insist that science is memorization, you tend to make statements along the lines of “scientists can’t communicate,” you need not worry. It’s not as though I’m going to be a writer, after all.
LAURA FEMINO , ’09, is from Cape Cod, Mass.
