I should have loved biology (2020)

The author had a negative experience with biology in high school, finding it to be a series of names and facts without any sense of wonder or excitement. They wished their teacher had emphasized the incredible nature of biological processes, such as how a single cell can develop into a complex human brain. The author only developed a deeper appreciation for biology later in college, when they encountered concepts like recursively self-modifying programs and the analogy between cellular processes and programming languages.

They compared learning about biology in school to memorizing chemical formulas, without much discussion of the awe-inspiring implications. The author contrasts the way biology is typically taught in schools - with dry facts and conclusions - to the passionate quest for scientific discovery found in real biologists' work. They cite an example of Oswald Avery's 1940s experiment, which demonstrated that DNA is the substance responsible for heredity, and how this discovery spurred further research leading to the discovery of the DNA double helix.

The author argues that biology education would benefit from presenting questions and real-world problems to pique student interest, rather than simply presenting dry facts. They advocate for a more engaging, project-based approach to learning biology, similar to how they discovered their passion for programming through hands-on projects.