I hope you think the picture is pretty, but I don’t expect you to be as taken away as I am: I understand that discovering the sight was part of the fulfillment’s process. I take that back, actually. I didn’t discover anything. I just observed some already-well-characterized phenomena.
A couple of months ago, when I just started my PhD training, I saw this image under the microscope. I forgot how much time I spent staring at all the different motor neurons, how they extended their processes to hold figurative hands and pass along chemical love messages. I spent more time taking the highest resolution picture I could, which has been edited to its current state.
If I gave this image to a polite, random neuroscientist, he/she would give me a coy smile and say that the picture was “nice and the TUJ1 antibody stained very well.” If I gave this image to an impatient and nasty, random neuroscientist he/she would scowl at the piece of paper and ask me why I was wasting his/her time: I’m not showing anything new!
I hope this figure will be as stunning to me in a few years, when I’ve read more literature and seen more figures and done more research and graduated with a PhD. Sure I’ll see a lot of similar images; I might be bombarded by them. But I hope to appreciate that the ordinary is beautiful too: because you see it once, doesn’t mean the allure has to fade.
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