As a young child, long before I knew what genes were, I had a certain curiosity about how the things around me were made and what made them tick. This curiosity pushed me to take toys and household appliances apart to try to figure out what was inside them that made them work and then try to put them back together again. To my mum, buying me toys was a waste of money cos they never lasted more than a week but to me they had served their purpose once I figured out how they worked.
I didn't fully understand this then, but I had an intuition that the most interesting things were made up of smaller things put together in a particular configuration and if I could figure out how my favourite things worked then I could rearrange the smaller things that made them up in different configurations to create new things that didn't exist yet and create the best toys in the world.
As I got my first introduction to Biology, Chemistry and Physics in secondary school one of the things that jumped out to me was that this idea of appliances and toys having inner mechanisms that made them function also applied to Living things. I didn't take long before it dawned on me that humans are "machines" too.
One of my deepest fascinations was with the cell or rather the idea of cells: these singular microscopic units that had all the characteristics of life, MR NIGER D and were capable of existing either as individual organisms or in groups with other similar cells to form even more complex tissues, organs and eventually whole new organisms.
From a vantage point, I appreciated how cells were the smaller things put together in a particular configuration inside me and all other living things that made us function the way we did and yet looking closer revealed that even these cells were made up of even smaller things put together in a particular configuration that made them function the way they did.
As I got older and understood more about how things worked, my line of inquiry started to shift from 'What is inside a thing that makes it function?' to 'How did things come to be configured the way they are in the first place and what drives all of this machinery?'
I could clearly see what appeared to be the "ordered steps of the universe" across its infinite levels of complexity and interconnected webs of cause and effect.
The whole universe was actively humming and churning, breaking things down and putting things together and it appeared to have been doing all of this and more since its beginning, whenever that was, as if it was spun into being with a set of back-end codes/algorithms it has been following ever since.
Through this understanding, I have come to develop a deeper appreciation and a sense of profound respect for the world around me as I continue to take inspiration from its inner workings to put smaller things together in different configurations to create things that have never existed before.
