Your Story, Refined

The petri dish shattered at 2 AM, scattering agar across my bedroom floor. Most teenagers would have cursed and gone to bed. I grabbed my notebook, not a broom. Even a failed attempt to culture Vibrio fischeri was still a result—another clue in my three-year quest to understand how marine organisms create light without heat. I built a shoebox incubator with a seedling mat, learned sterile technique after contaminating a dozen plates, and wrote a Python script to track luminescence. Biology, to me, isn't a set of answers; it's the discipline of turning "why" into "how," one messy iteration at a time.