Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States, a time for gratitude and community. Intangible qualities like these challenge science, since they don’t lend themselves as readily to quantifying or to controlled investigation. Much easier for a scientist to tackle topics like tryptophan in turkey–no, that’s not what makes you drowsy after dinner–because we have better tools for studying molecules. That doesn’t mean gratitude or community aren’t real or significant to our lives, just that we need different tools to study them.
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