Meng Hao

In my favorite web novel, I Shall Seal the Heavens by Er Gen, a naive young scholar dreams of protecting his family, friends, and freedom from the injustices of mortal conflict. Meng Hao, though full of foibles and humility, takes his noble cause seriously. He’s not a likely hero as he collects, ponders and preserves the past to better his future but I admire this historian character for steeling himself away to protect what he has cultivated and find the path to immortality. Simple actions - a snowflake melting in the hand, an excursion through a cave - catalyze a life-changing revelation in his pursuit for truth. Conflict arises from lack of understanding, and Meng Hao is the looking glass that provides brief illumination into the blurred world of immortals that surrounds him. He arduously ascends into immortality to manifest his Dao (and he doesn’t stop there). This novel emphasizes the imaginative leaps that showcase science at its best. Also profoundly impactful was reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of all Maladies, a biography on the history of cancer that shares the insights of many scholars researching cancer. Both books are testimonies to inquiry at all costs. Learning motivates me to read, to accumulate experiences, ask questions

I learned when I was 5 that there is often no comforting logic to some of the most important questions--immunoglobulin may bind to foreign antigens to trigger histamine production but that fails to justify my younger brother’s near death experience when he accidentally ingested whey protein. Life-threatening allergies have become a part of his life--an idea that Sun Tzu expresses in the Art of War: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” My family’s incapacity to change my brother’s circumstances was mitigated by the doctors’ knowledge: the EpiPen, an ambulance, CPR, a