I relayed that story to my family in Minnesota over the holidays, much to their amusement. Unlike my Microbiology professor, my relatives knew exactly what the joke meant. In fact, I’m pretty sure they taught me that joke. Sadly, it just didn’t land with a professor who’d spent his whole life attending and teaching at inner-city universities, completely oblivious to the redneck culture that largely raised me.
But, a couple weeks after I embarrassed myself during office hours, my professor sent me an email with a link to a new PBS documentary about a scientist called Dr. Philip Allan Sharp. Turns out, Dr. Sharp grew up on a farm in the middle-of-nowhere Kentucky, and became the first in his family to not only go to college, but to earn his PhD and later a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research into RNA (which paved the way to things such as mRNA vaccines).
Evidently, my professor sensed my insecurity while I sat in his office, and wanted to make sure that I knew, under no uncertain terms, that I belonged at university.
Moreover, my family in Minnesota made sure to let me know that they were proud of me for going to university, and were cheering me on.
After all, modern-day farmers and ranchers often work hand-in-hand with scientists and academics to grow crops, care for livestock, and maintain farming equipment. In fact, farming basically is a science. What seems to set farmers and academics apart has to do more with culture rather than what they do for work.
Both scientists and farmers have to know a ton about the natural world around them, so that they can manipulate the natural world to work in their favor. I mean… all crops and livestock- including the “certified organic” ones- are genetically modified so much so that they can’t exist in the wild without human intervention.
Turns out, it takes the mind of a scientist to pair two or more things together to produce offspring with a desired trait, whether that’s sweeter sweet corn or a Hereford bull that never grows horns.
In other words, I do come from a long lineage of scientists. Those scientists were (and are) just a little culturally different than the scientists who wear white lab coats and teach lectures to hundreds (and sometimes even thousands) of people at a time.
