Since I was a child I am so curious with how do people get brown skin, while others get white? I kept on asking myself is there anyway to bring back an animal (like dinosaurs) that is long been extinct or even asking if I can breed a cat and a dog together or a frog and a turtle, yes such was my curiosity when I was a young boy. Now that I am in the last year of my bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, I have came to realize that I don’t want to end up as a mere chemical engineer alone, surely there is more to me than to calculate chemical engineering problems, I want more than these, I want to engineer not only materials but living materials as well which leads me to the interest of three particular fields: Genetics, Molecular Biology and Molecular Medicine. When I was in high school I met this interesting person. He was an Augustinian Priest and a Leader of Brno Observatory, although he failed the science exams at the University of Vienna two times, he still pursue his teaching career and lastly before me and this person bid our farewell he left a very interesting mark and influence in me, yes he may have failed two exams in one prestigious university but people like Watsons and Cricks praise him because he is not much as to found the science of Genetics, this man is no other than Fr. Gregor Mendel himself.
When I graduated high school, I thought that I wont come across with Fr. Mendel again, but life has a funny way of messing up things in a good way. After failing four subjects in my Chemical Engineering course I stumble again upon with my old acquaintance, Fr. Gregor Mendel, in the science library but his time he brought some friends with him to meet too. He brought with him his three friends Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak. He also brought with him his best friend to meet me his name is Mr. George Weldon, and to make things merrier he unhesitantly acquaint me with Mr. William Bateson, a biology professor at Cambridge University. After that I met William S. Sutton and Thomas Hunt Morgan along with his colleagues: Alfred Sturtevant, Calvin Bridges and Hermann J. Muller. Furthermore I also met the team of Mr. George Beadle and Edward Tatum and lastly I met James Watson and Francis Crick. For that instant I also knew that I am but a mere stranger to them, a young man named Gerard Ompad. But then again I also knew that day I met ordinary men and, like Fr. Mendel himself, may have made mistakes like I did but pursue to make their ordinary lives extraordinary by thinking on what things to do after failures has set in. like what Luis Pasteur said: "Chances favors the prepared mind". So I redressed my spirit and shove off the shame of my failed grades. I want to become a teacher someday, but I wont be any ordinary teacher who just come up with lecture notes and discuss my students to sleep. I will be a teacher to any of this field: Genetic engineering, Molecular Biology or Molecular Medicine.
I thank that time when Fr. Mendel plan to met me again and showed me the many possibilities of becoming a science teacher. Like him I am also a poor boy. He (Fr. Mendel) being a son of a farmer and me being a son of a police officer the only difference between us is that his father cannot support him for a college university while my father cannot support me to pursue my graduate studies. That’s why I am hoping that life will mess things up again and this time I will stumble up with Mr. Bill Gates to finance my Graduate studies maybe that will do fine with me. I am not a smart person, I should say but like Fr. Mendel I am a great experimentalist and I record keen details and process the collected data in both quantitative and qualitative manner. Apparently I know it will be a long way up the ladder with my situation right now, penniless to buy my own book, enduring that one kilometer walk from school to my house every day to save money to buy my lunch at school. But that will not stop me from planning and setting goals. As long as man has the will to pursue then he has the greatest capacity to survive even at the most harsh weathers and the most hostile conditions. Lastly before me, Fr. Mendel and his friends walk our own ways that day I learn I good lesson with them: "it doesn’t need great intelligence to make a science book but a simple curiosity and the will to seek the answers to these inquiries."
-Gerard D. Ompad
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