Why I switched from humanities to science

Many of you may be startled, at first, by my almost 180° turn from the humanities to science. But for me, it was never a turn so much as a natural continuum. It is more of the cumulative result of everything that came before it.

I grew up in an education system that sorts students into humanities and science tracks early and keeps them apart. I chose the humanities without a second thought. Perhaps like many people who end up on the liberal arts track, I never clicked with science and was never a fan of math. Or so I thought. Ironically, after working through countless practice problems in high school, I began to enjoy math for the satisfaction of piecing together a solution, much as I would a puzzle.

What drew me in were culture, history, languages, and the possibilities contained in novels. I could spend an entire day alone, inventing stories and drawing them onto paper. There were so many lives to imagine, so many ways to inhabit the world. Among the thousands of futures I imagined for myself, “scientist” or “researcher” never once made the list.

Still, I was always a “why” person. I had little embarrassment about asking a question that might sound foolish, and being told that something was simply the way it was rarely satisfied me.

Since childhood I have been troubled by a fear of death (a.k.a. thanatophobia). I suspect many of you felt something like it as kids, and most people grow out of it somewhere in the busyness of adulthood. I never did. Every so often I would wake in the middle of the night, drenched in cold sweat, wondering why life is created at all if it is meant to end. The adults around me would brush it off and tell me to accept it. But I have never been able to accept something just because everyone else does; I need a reason that actually holds up. So the question kept ringing in my ears: why does nearly every individual life come with an expiration date, and could it be pushed back, so that people have time to fully grow into their talents and explore more of what they could become?

A recurring existential dread is not, on its own, a reason to rearrange my life. It took a few more pushes.

In my sophomore year at Waseda University, I was selected for a yearlong exchange at the University of California, Berkeley. The freedom to take classes beyond my usual field allowed me to follow interests that my education had previously kept apart. At Berkeley I stepped outside my own head and looked at the physical world for the first time. The exchange program let me enroll across departments, and I used that freedom to wander between philosophy and natural science, which turned out to be far less separate than my old school system had taught me.

Philosophy courses raised questions about the mind, consciousness, and human agency. A popular neuroscience course, Drugs and the Brain, gave some of those questions a physical immediacy. Learning how chemicals could alter perception, mood, and thought made the relationship between mind and body feel newly concrete. The inner world that fascinated me in literature was also connected to biological processes I could study. Meanwhile, classes on Sartre and Nietzsche watered a seed that had been buried in me for years: the conviction that I, as an individual, actually have the power to alter reality, rather than being a leaf swept along by the current of my times.

The second push came from outside the classroom. In Berkeley I met some researchers working on aging outside the usual academic structures. It was the first time I realized I was not the only crazy person in the world who wanted people to live longer. Talking with them gave me a confidence I had not had before: that there were others who shared this ambition, and that I could work alongside them.

Then COVID arrived and slammed the world shut, cornering each of us into a quarantine shell. If anything good came out of that period for me, it was the forced retreat. With nowhere to go, I finally had to sit with the questions I had been circling: what do I actually want to do when I graduate? What kind of work compounds, where I keep learning and growing for decades instead of plateauing?

I loved, and still love, the imaginative narratives and philosophical arguments I was raised on. Yet I was growing restless with the kind of textual work I was doing. I wanted to build something that did not exist yet, something with a broad and lasting effect on the real world rather than on my inner life alone. And I realized I could always keep reading and writing as the things I do for love. For the work that would fill my days, it would be more fun, more sustainable, and more exciting to chip away at a hard scientific problem — one that gratified my own curiosity and might benefit a broader range of people. Somewhere in that long quarantine, the cocoon cracked.

Turning a life-altering decision into a realistic plan is another matter, especially with limited money and no institutional path to follow. My home university had no mechanism for a humanities student to cross into the sciences. Every step from then on had to be calculated.

I chose a second bachelor’s degree over a master’s because I believed an undergraduate program would give me a far more rigorous scientific foundation. With the few options I had, I took a leap of faith and applied to exactly one school, UW-Madison’s second-degree program. If I did not get in, I told myself, I would accept the verdict, go back to Japan, take whatever job would have me, and make peace with a path I had not chosen. I have a habit of this: stripping a decision down to two extremes and leaving myself no exits. It worked this time. I got in, and my scientific life has run forward from that point ever since.

Everything I have told you so far adds up to a tidy story: a person who switched to science for one purpose, extending life. But several years inside aging research have complicated the ending. Many of the discoveries that defined an era were never aimed at the problem they ended up solving. CRISPR began as a curiosity about bacteria’s defense system against viral infection; GLP-1, the hormone behind the drugs now rewriting the treatment of obesity, was found in the 1980s by scientists studying how the gut talks to the pancreas, and the first drug built on it came from the venom of a desert lizard, the Gila monster. Nobody set out to make a weight-loss blockbuster. The discoveries came first; the applications wandered in years later.

What interests me about these histories is the way possibilities widened as I learned more. Unexpected connections and purposeful development both mattered. They remind me that the eventual value of a discovery can extend beyond the question that first prompted it.

That is what resonates with me in the title of a book I once came across, Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman’s Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. Moving forward, I want to loosen my grip on “curing aging” and lean into the research itself. I want to leave room for science to be a playground as well as a mission. I still care about extending life. I am simply learning to stop demanding that the answers arrive on my schedule.