The Chemistry of Us

This reflective essay was submitted as part of Catalyst’s 2020 Writing Contest and was selected as one of the winning submissions. To view more submissions from the Writing Contest, please visit utcatalyst.org/writing-contest.

Photo Credit: Olivia Conway

My summer job involved two responsibilities: escorting small children to the bathrooms and making baking soda volcanos.

Before this summer, I had seen my fair share of baking soda volcanos in elementary school classrooms, chemistry festivals, and YouTube videos, but I had never made one. Bemoaning my lack of artistic skills, I spent hours covered in glue and paint, painstakingly laying strips of soggy newspaper in a shape that vaguely resembled a volcano, the same way you look at an abstract painting and pretend to see the self portrait. Perfection is overrated, I thought, deciding that the lumpy surface and lopsided cone added an element of authenticity. I set it up in the grass, still green from spring rains, hoping my audience would refrain from the brutal honesty characteristic of young children. A row of four year olds sat rapt in front of me, waiting for something to happen, staring in that way four year olds do, with their whole body. 

I poured vinegar into the opening of the volcano and the kids went wild. The solution bubbled and frothed over the edge, as expected, and they cheered for more. I, their scientific magician, delivered, spooning half a box of baking soda and the rest of the vinegar into my papier-mache structure. For me, it was just a chemical reaction, the most familiar I could think of. For them, it was like magic. On a hot Friday morning, like any other summer morning in Texas, I had made something erupt in front of their eyes. 

I guess for them it was magic, because science is just magic we now understand. Alchemy was a mystic art until we acquired enough knowledge to classify the process of turning one compound into another as chemistry. Weather was the work of spirits and angry gods until we realized that there were connections between pressure systems and storms. So much remains delightfully unknown and unexplained--all that has changed is our relatively new expectation that the elusive answers will eventually be found in empirical evidence.

I spent enough time in the American education system to abandon my youthful fascination with magic, but I still marvel at scientific discovery because nothing is ever just a chemical reaction. My baking soda volcano was the first science experiment some of these four year olds had ever seen. For some, it will be special, now and decades into the future. Maybe my volcano, that acid-base reaction that I can’t even remember learning for the first time, will be the chemical reaction that sparks their love of science — the catalyst in their formative education. Perhaps this is a wishful statement, but my eyes were originally opened by something equally as mundane. 

I fall in love with science every day, but I still remember the first time. MUSE magazine had published an article about the 2002 West Nile outbreak, and I was obsessed. I breathlessly devoured paragraphs of the story, following my heroes, the CDC, as they tracked West Nile antibodies through the American hospital system. Antibodies, I whispered to myself, having never heard the word before but reveling in its connotations of mystery and danger. In seven short pages, I learned that mosquitoes can make us sick and pathogens can hitchhike on transplanted organs and science can answer these questions and save our lives. I dreamed of being a doctor until I realized that medicine was only a subset of biology; then I dreamed of being a biologist until I realized that biology is derived from chemistry; then I took organic chemistry and realized that chemistry could explain everything and I needed answers. 

The chemical reactions that changed my life were on paper. I discovered the beauty of organic chemistry during the summer of the pandemic, the summer of turmoil and change and volatility. A summer of heartache and heartbreak, but organic chemistry was an ordered, reliable refuge. On paper everything works: Grignards attack here and stereochemistry is inverted like this and every reaction produces perfect yield. My chemical utopia: a chaos of reactions that I could control. For me, these were more than just reactions; they were tools of self-discovery, soothing and concrete, that prompted different chemical reactions in my brain to preserve the information in a synapse. Paper chemistry became real chemistry, but chemistry is never just chemistry. 

The production of serotonin in the brains of the four year olds as they watched my volcano erupt, in my brain when I feel the first warm breezes of spring or see my friends after months of separation, in all of us when we feel really, truly happy is not just a chemical reaction. Love is a chemical reaction, but so much more than that too because the starting materials were me and you and the product is us. The fission inside atomic bombs is not just a chemical reaction to those whose shadows are permanently burned into solid walls. Combustion cannot be just a chemical reaction to those who have lost everything to fire. How we feel when we are sad or terrified or so blissfully happy we could burst is so much more than just a chemical reaction. 

Humans are self-contained labs full of chemical reactions. The buffer systems in our blood maintain an ideal pH. Our cells turn nutrients into energy, small scale explosions that happen while we’re unaware. The receptors that pull ions in and out of my nerves and scream signals through my body when I touch something hot are chemical reactions that save me from my own poor judgment. We are kept alive by a dynamic chemistry that does not quit even when we don’t know how to keep going, even when we don’t know what we are supposed to be doing. Chemistry is never just chemistry because sometimes it produces energy and sometimes pain and sometimes adrenaline, and all of these culminate in life.

And I will always be a chemical reaction, a wonder of nature and chance that somehow won the lottery of living and got to participate in a chemical reaction called DNA replication and another chemical reaction called cellular respiration and another chemical reaction called thinking as my synapses fire to each other from across the expanse of my brain, itself a product of another chemical reaction.

And together we become a different chemical reaction, one called friendship. Because when I see you my brain makes chemicals that tell me that I like you, and then I can make my own words using my lips, which are also the products of chemical reactions, to tell you that myself. And someday when we are no more, our atoms will still be here together performing their own chemical reactions. Circling each other to the edge of the universe, joining that star or maybe that planet. Or maybe we will stay, and you, you will be part of that chestnut tree, which we can’t see yet because it's performing its own chemical reactions deep inside the soil, waiting for a chance to break free. And I? I will be a baking soda volcano, my atoms erupting over and over again for the next generation of scientists, who may be only four, but have the capacity to perform all the necessary chemical reactions that will allow them to grow up.

Chemical reactions are matter asserting itself, marking its presence with a bang or a glow or a flash of bright light. Chemical reactions are life, astounded at its own existence, celebrating its ability to turn something into something better, an organized chaos, a symphony of sentient science.