When I write about myself, it always reads like a poorly crafted match.com zinger. Boring, awkward, and something along the lines of:
I’m Alex. Aquarius. Love dogs, classic rock, old NCIS episodes. $1 Goodwill paperback thrillers, marked with “Happiest 53rd Richard! All my love, Janet” and “8/17/2005, Saw this and thought of you!” And I like to ask myself why Steven King’s Carrie conjures up thoughts of said person? Who’s Richard? How’s Janet?
I also love coffee. And tea. Peppermint, of course. Irish breakfast, sure. Chamomile, why not. But I think I really just like collecting mugs — hearty ceramics, dainty porcelain, hand-painted, non-dishwashable, chipped, stained monstrosities. It might be a problem though (as I don’t have much shelf space).
Favorite genre of film? It’s got to be anything in the Meg Ryan romcom cinematic universe. Or the Brat Pack coming-of-age cannon. Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, About Last Night, Pretty in Pink. Really just the Judd Nelson je ne sais quoi.
I think my 2nd grade superlative was “Wormiest Bookworm,” whatever that means. That might’ve been the year I read every Nancy Drew book in the library and founded the neighborhood’s first and only detective business. I do wish I could say I’ve Jules Verne’d the world in 80 days — circumnavigating all five nebulous oceans, frozen Arctic plains, Swiss peaks, and continental slopes; Phileas Fogging my way through the Mediterranean, aperitivo in hand. But I’m a bit unworldly in the geographic sense. I’ve only been out of the country once to boat up next to Niagara Falls, wearing a thin, plastic poncho and an I <3 Canada tee (though I’ve possibly made it a second time to Canada after getting lost on the circumference of a lake in Vermont).
I’ve only ever lived in Charleston, SC, never straying too far from its labyrinth of intercostals and waterways, its Theseus-like shrimpers, gliding into port. At Duke, I spend half my time majoring in molecular/cellular biology and the other lamenting my landlockedness, missing Charleston’s temperate sea breeze.
Growing up there was all briny inlet and Waffle House, midnight bacon, butter pats, cordgrass, molting blue crab, churches on every street corner and in every denomination, weak coffee and greasy hash brown breakfast, September hurricanes, salt, cicadas, farm stands packed with peaches, a once-in-a-hundred year 6-inch snowfall that closed school for two weeks.
On Saturdays, I sharktooth-hunted with my sisters in pluff mud plots now developed (strangers tend to find the smell of the marsh pungent, but I think it’s character building). Fished for red drum. Searched for pearls in half-mooned oyster mouths. Kayaked down creeks.
Charleston’s a literary city, or so I’ve always heard. I think Edgar Allen Poe’s ghost haunts a cobble-stoned alley downtown or something like that. And if not an alley then a quaint B&B, its porch bearing creaky rocking chairs and purple coneflower. I went to an arts-specialized middle and high school for creative writing, wrote some bad poetry in my formative years and a couple of questionable short films, then went to college and somehow fell into the field of cell bio and now I spend a decent chunk of my free time researching genetic heart disease in a campus lab. Feeding cardiomyocytes via gentle pipette like they’re sea monkeys.
I like to picture the act of writing and that of science as similar — fraternal twins or first cousins — and I don’t think it a coincidence that early philosophers were our first physicians, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, etc. Both fields challenge us to pose questions about our world, about its inhabitants, its oddities, its nuances. We just go about answering them differently.
For this reason, I’m incredibly excited to join Duke’s Research Blog, to write about science and innovation, to poeticize protein structures or to search for lyricism in neuronal action potentials the way a deep sea troller searches for the elusive giant squid. I just think there’s something so wonderful about learning new things, cradling little curiosities that often lead nowhere, and doing so through an accessible, enjoyable medium.
Post by Alex Clifford, Class of 2024