Written by: Kenia Contreras
Edited by: Kaitrin Freeland, Juan Mato
Illustrated by: Adriana Brown
Ancient hands pulled strings taut on bows beneath the young sun. Calloused hands spread tar across rooftops under summer heat. Tanned hands scrubbed grime from grout beneath crystal chandeliers. Now, gloved hands pipette beneath fluorescent laboratory lights.
Humanity has come a long way since Lucy, one of our earliest known human ancestors. Lucy, like many of our ancestors, had to put survival and instinct first; there was room for nothing else. Every hour was spent hunting, gathering, building, and enduring. Survival was not a choice. Before humanity could advance, our ancestors first had to withstand the brutality of the world around them.
And then, somewhere along the way, someone stepped away from survival long enough to ask why. Someone stopped to think.
Why does the sun disappear each night and return each morning? Why do some plants harm while others heal? Why does a stone fall while a bird soars?
Those simple questions marked the beginning of something uniquely human: a desire to understand the world and our place within it.
When people hear “History of Science,” they think of the first microscope, the first equation, the first cell discovered, the first inventions, and the people behind these ideas and feats. These firsts get most of the credit. Yes, they were the first. But what circumstances made it possible and who sacrificed so they could get there? How did they come to have this opportunity?
For most of human history, science was a luxury, exclusive to certain individuals. Barriers like class, financial status, and even gender barred many from pursuing science as a career. Figures like George Washington Carver, who pioneered agricultural sciences, and Marie Curie, acclaimed chemist and physicist, had to fight against barriers that told them curiosity did not belong to their race or gender.
Curiosity is often treated as something natural and inevitable, but it isn’t. Curiosity is a privilege. Studying fire instead of simply basking in its warmth or shaping tools instead of using them to secure the next meal, required time spent questioning instead of on survival. It required sacrifice, the kind that makes it possible generations later for someone else to sit in a lab and ask questions of their own.
Survival was immediate and necessary when humanity began its course on Earth. Before there was discovery, there was endurance. Someone had to hunt the food, tend the fire, and stand watch through the night so the group could survive long enough for curiosity to emerge. While one person imagined the first tool or discovered how to build a fire, someone else carried the burden of survival. Their labor created the space for curiosity to exist. Only when survival no longer consumed every waking moment did humanity finally have room for something more, the opportunity to question, to imagine, and to dream of a life beyond mere survival. Humanity’s earliest questions and hypotheses were not funded by wealth, but by sacrifice.
That kind of sacrifice repeats itself across generations, it doesn’t just disappear. It repeats itself in different forms. It shows up in long shifts, tired hands, and heavy eyes. It quietly shapes and determines who gets to be curious, and who must spend their energy on survival.
Over time those sacrifices accumulate and knowledge itself becomes inheritance. Some families have long generations of scholars, philosophers, and scientists embedded in their blood. In others, survival leaves little room for that tradition to take root. But they have to begin somewhere.
I am one of those beginnings.
My mother left Mexico as a teenager when her family could no longer afford her education. She immigrated to the United States to clean and tend to strangers’ homes, sending money back home with the hope that one day she might return to her education. Instead, she built a life here, she had children, and that dream slowly slipped out of reach.
In her world labor was valuable. It put food on the table; the pursuit of knowledge did not. Who cares about the inner workings of a cell when there are mouths to feed?
My father grew up on a small rural farm in Mexico. He found himself in the United States, searching for a better life in the kitchens of restaurants and on the damaged roofs of strangers’ homes.
For many years, curiosity felt distant, impractical, and impossible to me. Something that was reserved for people with enough resources and time. I thought science belonged to people who came from generations of scientists, from people whose parents understood laboratories the same way mine understood kitchens, gardens, and construction sites.
My father understands the weight of shingles in the summer heat and the rhythm of a kitchen during a dinner rush. He often came home with sunburned skin, dust trapped in the creases of his hands, and paint stuck under the beds of his nails. My mother came home exhausted too, her hands rough and raw from cleaning and tending to other homes. She understood motherhood, the tight dust ridden corners, and the smell of fresh laundry.
As a child I never saw these things as sacrifices, they were simply life. Work was what mattered. Labor kept the family afloat.
Their work was too different from mine. Theirs was physical, immediate, necessary. Mine felt abstract, distant, and optional. But the first time I stayed in a laboratory late into the night, I began to understand them differently. Now I see my parents’ hard work paralleling my own. Incubators hummed in the background as I repeated experiments, failing, adjusting, and trying once more. My mother scrubbing the corners of homes that were never hers no longer felt separate from the repetitive motions of my own work. My father balancing himself on rooftops beneath unforgiving summer heat no longer felt distant from me. For the first time, the distance between my world and my parents no longer felt so large.
Long hours, failure and persistence, attention to detail, precision, endurance, repetition, and discipline, all qualities my parents practiced long before I ever stepped into a lab. Without even realizing it, my parents had taught me the endurance that science demands. The tools are different, but the labor remains rooted in the same hope: that the effort today will secure something better for tomorrow.
Somewhere between Lucy gathering food beneath an unforgiving sun and my mother scrubbing the floors of strangers’ homes, the same pattern repeated itself: someone sacrificing so that someone else might have the chance to ask why. Survival and discovery were never separate acts. One made the other possible.
I used to think that becoming a scientist meant separating myself from where I came from. Now I realize that I am not separate from my family’s history of labor, rather I am built from it. My mother and father spent years performing exhausting labor so their children could have choices they never did.
Humanity itself is built upon generations of labor. Hands that planted crops and built homes carried an entire species forward. As our ancestors worked to secure survival, each generation gained a little more space to ask questions. The curiosity that drives scientific discovery exists because of the countless people before us that devoted their lives to creating opportunities for those who came after them.
Just as I stand on the shoulders of great scientists before me, I also stand on the shoulders of a man and a woman who crossed borders so that their children might have the possibility of choosing knowledge over necessity. For my parents, survival came first. Their sacrifices created the possibility of curiosity for me.
My scientific lineage did not begin with me. It began in the houses my mother tended to and on the foreign roofs my father fixed, all so I could afford to ask why.
Kenia is a graduate student in the Biological Chemistry department. Her research in structural biology focuses on understanding the molecular machinery of bacterial pathogens, particularly Legionella pneumophila. Outside of research, Kenia enjoys writing, biking, and trying new foods.
