The Day Science Came Alive

A student from the valley shares how a lab experiment transformed her idea of what science really is, and what it could be for others.

- Seerat Maqbool

For most of my school life, science was something I memorized. Not explored. Not questioned. Just memorized.

We were taught to define terms, draw neat diagrams, and score well in exams. The system rewarded speed and accuracy: how quickly you could recall the structure of a cell or write down Newton's laws.

There was no time to stop and ask why anything worked the way it did.

That began to change when I stepped into a lab at the University of Kashmir. I was studying clinical biochemistry, and my assignment placed me in the Structural Biology Lab at CIRI, where I worked on proteins involved in building ribosomes.

Ribosomes are tiny structures inside our cells that produce proteins. But what struck me was this strange and beautiful cycle: the proteins I studied helped build the ribosomes, and the ribosomes, in turn, built every other protein in the body. It felt like a perfect loop, a factory assembling the very machines that built it.

That moment stayed with me. It was the first time I felt a genuine sense of awe about science. Not because it was complicated, but because it was elegant. I wasn't just reading facts, I was watching them unfold.