I avoid death every time I cross a sidewalk block: I never take exactly four steps before I

step into the next. In Chinese, the word for “four” is a bad omen because it is a homophone of
the word for “death.”
For me, though, my aversion towards the number is more of a habit than a phobia, but I
still display it in some silly ways. For instance, I avoid being the fourth person to enter or exit a
room, I avoid sitting in seats from the fourth row from the front, and I especially avoid eating
only four of anything.
Irrationalities may be inherently absurd, but everyone has them whether they are
conscious of it or not. My peers procrastinate on their homework despite knowing it burdens
them with unnecessary stress, while we all tend to be attached to furniture we build even
though we know we can buy ones built better.
But when we think about scientists, the word “irrational” rarely comes to mind. In all
honesty, though, I believe that all scientists have and, in fact, need moments of irrationality.
I started to develop this mindset during my summer internship at a biotech company
called iXCells, where I worked on researching and preparing a presentation about ALS in
addition to lab work. To my dismay, I found out that the disease is incurable and had no known
or well-understood cause. Pretty soon, I had an irrational fear of getting ALS myself--I took my
restless legs, moments of numbness, or twitches as signs of impending doom.
Irrationality most often shows up as attributing (often outlandish) causes to those
things we cannot make sense of--but it could be just the belief that there is a cause, a reason,
for the chaos we experience.
I just could not accept that the disease happened for no reason: there had to be an
explanation why only certain people had the disease, why some survive its devastating effects,
or why it causes neurons to degenerate. These are questions my research mentor asked himself
before he made his discoveries and the kind of questions I’ve asked myself while I mapped out
interactions that could cause ALS. I’ve done the same at the UCSD COSMOS program, where I
asked lecturing professors why our cells incorrectly replicate DNA or why bacteria had intricate
ways to regulate their genes.
It’s the same outside of the lab too. I tutor children in math at a small community center
in the middle of a Latin American neighborhood. Armed with a tiny whiteboard, I mainly work
with a fifth grader named Bruno, giving him short lectures interspersed with quizzes and
homework help. Despite my best efforts to make sure he understood the concepts, Bruno
struggled; every time he encountered a difficult problem in his school work, he would cry and
burst into a tantrum, sweeping books, fruit snacks, and pencils onto the ground. Other tutors
told me that it was a regular occurrence and that I shouldn’t worry about it, as if he were a lost
cause.
But, irrationally, I wanted to keep working. I reminded him that no one is supposed to
instantly know how to solve everything. And to get the ball rolling, I fed him hints to develop his
intuition for problem solving. His attitude toward learning definitely didn’t change overnight,
and he still needs help understanding concepts such as variables and decimals, but he is at least
more comfortable with his own pace in learning.
I’ve often heard that science is a realm of reason. But now I think that it’s less of a logos-
driven, “being rational” style of reason and more of reason in a “there must be an explanation”
sense. Perhaps the most irrational thought of all is that we can really understand our universe,
but that is the thought that lies at the core of scientific work and at the core of every major
social movement, all the things that have made our world better.