Uncomfortable
This makes me very uncomfortable. (Image from Wikipedia)
The ESC conference I attended earlier this month got me thinking (as any good conference should).
Not only was I thinking about all the really cool research going on around the country, but also about future directions for my own work, and for my growth as a grad student. As I watched talk after talk, it became apparent that certain high-tech molecular tools are rapidly becoming prevalent in entomological research, which I tend to think of as being a very field-based (and not high-tech) science. This view is, of course, heavily influenced by my own largely field-based, whole-organism research and the community-level ecological framework in which I tend to like to work.
By the time I got home from the conference, I was a little worked up about all this molecular mumb0-jumbo. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t want to feel obligated to incorporate it into my own research. It seemed unnecessarily complicated. “Screw you, molecular junk”, I thought.
Then I thought about it some more. And I came to the realization that I was being a little rash. A little judgmental. A little, well…a little terrified, actually.