The Beauty Of Science • Niba Nirmal
(Genetics PhD Student, Duke University || NC USA)
“We’ve evolved to buy our food and clothes in stores, so people have forgotten that plants are the backbone of human society. A lot of really important discoveries come from plants — they can do incredible things animals and humans can’t because plants have stem cells their whole lives. If you take a tiny piece of a plant and put it in some soil, it can grow an entirely new body! That’s like taking a finger off a human and growing a whole new human! Plants came up with all sorts of weird adaptations because they can’t move, like being able to alter their body plan anytime they want to. For my PhD, I’m working on understanding how plants express their genes in order to grow properly.
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I have an intense interest in research around feminine things like hair masks and rose water — but there’s not a lot of research there so it’s difficult to understand. I get comments — ’It’s so weird you’re interested in beauty and fashion but also doing science’ — but they’re not mutually exclusive! I like that this generation is much more inclusive, because it’s part of how we can make science more diverse — that’s how you open the door to novel ideas and discoveries. I was exposed to a lot of people like me in the sciences — I had female mentors, SOGI mentors, people of color, etc. It’s important to be able to see people like you in the position you want to be in.
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I’m interested in beauty, fashion, and skincare, but I don’t want to buy products because so-and-so influencer said it was good. There’s a weird hype around ‘natural’ ingredients, fruit flavoring for example, but actually extracting them is sometimes much less sustainable than synthesizing the compound. I want to make my product decisions based on data and science. I thought, there have to be other people who feel this way. With my channel, @notesbyniba, I want to take beauty, skincare, and fashion and explain the science behind them. It’s nice when people who aren’t in science tell me that science is cool — that’s the real way science communication happens — scientists talking to people outside the community who may have felt excluded from the ivory tower.”
