Blog

"Honestly, the real thrill of conducting research, and what makes it worth persevering despite the gruelling nature of it is that biology, to quote Barbara McClintock, “never ceases to amaze us”. While standard protocols and set pipelines are important for scientific rigour, and making research reproducible, does it leave room for creativity? Imagine the stories we miss as we disregard negative data!"

"When you are curious is when you pay attention, and when you pay attention you get more curious, it's the one inexhaustible cycle that can wheel your journey. Life is long, life is tedious, the system will keep forcing you to determine but the world is ever changing and the only way to make sense of it all is to be curious and to pay attention, to what is around and to what is within."

"I enjoy being this sort of Sherlock in "life" sciences, unravelling the secrets that constitute life. I dream of scintillating labs around, opening windows for all minds to abound."

"I am telling you this because I want you to understand, that you don’t have to know what you want to do in science. It’s not an intersection of roads, rather you are in a boat called Life floating in the ocean of scientific pursuits, and you can pick any direction you want. And guess what? You can always edit your course as you go along."

"In this post, we go into the guiding ideology behind Biotales—to forge a connection between the participants and their science through autobiographical accounts fashioned as outreach material—through the spirit of Barbara McClintock’s scientific inquiry encapsulated in the phrase a feeling for the organism."

"Hi everyone, my name’s Ipshita, Biotales’ visual design and illustration intern! You’ve probably seen my name in the credits of a few posts, either under some illustrations or the recent Biotales posters. It’s about due time I introduce myself (further than whatever is on the About page, anyway). So here it is!"

"What happens to a person inside a laboratory? In a warm up activity which we called “You in your research”, we asked participants to scribble on sticky notes who they are inside and outside the laboratory, and what aspect of the person they are changes when they walk into a laboratory.
In the visuals in this post, we have clustered the participants' sticky notes around three hybrid human figures consisting of the’ Inside the Lab’ and the ‘Outside the Lab’ halves sutured together."
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"Through a series of word association activities, Biotales participants responded to words such as “laboratory” and the words “excitement” and “pain” around their research experiences. Hover over the word clouds to sense the emotional landscape around biological sciences research– the highs and lows of it."

"What are some of the experiences, events and significant life events that gets someone to pursue biological sciences research?

Throughout the Biotales workshops, participants shared their individual stories of how they got hooked to science as young people. This post visualises these stories in the form of sparks of inspiration."

"In these two short posts, Manmath and Dhirendra describe first encounters with lab phenomena and biological procedures."