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What is science? People often tend to confine it in numbers and figures, in wavelengths and frequencies and unrelenting sequences, but is that really it? IT is a way of life, its our way of interpreting and perceiving, it is ‘living.’ And to any person affiliated with any of it’s innumerable branches, You know on a molecular level that, it’s HOME.
It’s a romance from the Victorian era, the deeper you get into it, the more you feel the beauty in the world, which seems to be playing music that you, can now hear.

“The earth has music for those who listen”

William Shakespeare

From the clothes on our backs to the device via which you are reading this, that miracle on its own, is science. And its not that we created something out of the blue, no we listened to what the universe was telling us. To be limitless to expand our horizons, to not see the world as it is but as it could be. To be more than what our mortal appendages could hold, like the cosmos.

I could innumerate, From cancer research to carbon sinks to neutrino particles, but let us dial back to a few millennia, from the first tools, to making fire, the uninhibited human mind created the world that we now see, a world of endless possibilities, a world full of dreams and wonder, contradicts the latest motion of how ‘science needs to have censors’, I beseech you, would you rather stop seeing the world grow and digress, would you rather stop music from serenading your homes, and move to caves as opposed to the lavish structures we now call home?
Science doesn’t take away wonders, it has brought them to you.
And so, here is my proof

Vaccines

The first one came to be known as Variolae vaccinae (literally translates to the small pox of the cow) by its founding father Edward Jenner which cured a deadly disease called smallpox. While the archives related to the origin of this disease are lost to time but it did affect people from all walks of life. And spread like a wildfire across the globe, killing 400,000 people annually in Europe alone. The ‘speckled monster’ as it was termed in18th century England had a fatality rate between 20-60%, leaving the survivors with ghastly disfiguring scars. And the fatality rate was even higher for infants, as high as 80% in London and 98% in Berlin. Though Jenner wasn’t the first to use the concept of inoculation, his work however contributed to what can be termed as a final crusade against the deadly disease. He observed that if a person infected by the pus from lesions of cowpox, they develop a ‘protection’ against small pox. To prove this, he inoculated an 8-year-old boy from fresh lesions, who when later inoculated by smallpox, did not acquire the disease.

Of Course we all know this story, Edward Jenner, the father of vaccines. Now imagine him being inhibited and stopped and censored, imagine the damage that rampant disease would have caused. If it were not for that pioneering technology, covid, that rampaged our streets killing millions, tormenting billions of lives, stripping us of our humanity as we couldn’t hold our loved ones, or hug them or stay with them or worse still, say goodbye to them, as the respective authorities burned them or buried them, with no one to grieve in their final moments. 6,825,461 reported deaths, with several deaths unregistered because the governments were trying to save face. Had it not been the efforts of scientists who worked tirelessly to put an end to this massacre, we wouldn’t even be in a position to talk about this as luxuriously as we are.

Now they say, precaution is better than cure, quite cheesy but true. While vaccines provided a cure to a plethora of illnesses what if, we could diagnose the problem before it metastasized. What if we discovered the site of potential tumor before it ran berserk. Each patient has a story to tell only if we listen.

Biosensors

Biosensors are analytical devices that convert biological responses to electrical signals. Example, the favorite of every Indian household, a glucometer.

Parts of biosensors: a biological element, the transducer and the detector.

Working of a biosensor : : It has a very simple working mechanism, pretty much like enzyme- substrate interactions. The analyte (what we wish to analyze) diffuses from the solution to the surface of the biosensor. And it reacts with the biological component of the biosensor, which causes a change in the physiochemical properties of the transducer. That in turn leads to a change in the electronic properties of the transducer surface. And an electrical signal thus generated is then viewed in a digital user-friendly format.

However, the more interesting bit would be if we blended nanotech with this. Which tons of scientists are working on as not only will it make detection of disease easier but also environmental monitoring or bacterial sensors in food industry. More importantly, the sheer number of lives we could save because instead of tedious hours spent in testing, we will be able to act first, no more misdiagnosis, no more lives lost to carelessness.
I shall conclude this with an anecdote about a 20-year-old girl. It was just another day for her, she was smart, an elite, happy, smiling with an infectious ebullience, yet one day she just fainted with a fibrillating heart, when the EMTs arrived, they used this machine called the ‘Lucas machine’ to form a cardiac massage when what it did was beat the poor heart muscle. Several attempts at defibrillating her heart into normal sinus rhythm, desperate attempts at surgery and drugs and tests, yet that young lady died of cerebral hernia because it was too late. If we had biosensors then, we could have saved her, she would have been someone that we knew because she was that smart and brilliant. Still feel the need to censor and limit science, ask yourself?