Hope is a thing with tufted wings, wrapped in cotton candy, sweet on the tongue as it melts. It is something intangible and unscientific. We have no empirical data. Hope exists in defiance of the logic of discovery.
But it does exist.
In the moments when we load a gel tray with DNA, invisible to the eye but tinged blue with 6x loading dye before the current runs away with it. It’s an unopened incubator door, behind which the delights of some clean, good colonies are sure to be.
Hope needs to exist.
It is the thing that enables you to open a door, believing that this time, you will feel that you are part of what is behind it. That your voice will not be shouted down. That science will welcome you. That this time, it will be different. Hope is why you peer and pry and quantify, even though you know that your credit card is maxed out and you are returning to an empty rented room somewhere that it is not worth rooting yourself because you hope, oh you hope, that there will be another contract somewhere else once yours ends.
It is there in every finger tap on buttons that say ‘submit’, powered by the belief that we are not yielding our plans and dreams to some greater power but instead, that we are leading. Just for a moment. That we do not seek permission.
You hope you will make a difference.
Hope is a heavy weight when children are dying from orphan diseases, when cancer treatments are no longer making leaps and bounds, when the world is fracturing around us. When we work on the miniscule, the microscopic, not the grand question but the seed, the kernel, the drop of knowledge we inoculate the culture with, in the hope that from that, something grand and momentous will grow.
Scientists carry the weight of the hope of others.
The parent fighting for admittance for their child to one experimental trial after another, investing so much hope in our ability to find something new, something different, something overlooked. Something that will gift them time. Time to grow. Time to experience. Time to live. The parent living on land being eaten away by waters that rise on the back of our innovation and consumption, investing so much hope in our ability to fix what we have broken so that their children can drink clean water, sleep safely in dry homes, and not be washed away by the floods we send them.
Hope is a thing with tufted wings, intangible and unscientific but it is the foundation of all we do.
Hope is why science exists.