A science story, huh?

Is NYU a scientist?

I felt it.

I was so unhappy.

It was that golden moment.

Because science was on my side.

Hey, everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true stories of how science has affected people's lives.

Last reminder, our next event in New York is December 17th. The theme is Science and Religion. See Storycollider.org for more.

This week's storyteller is Lawrence David.

The story was recorded in December 2012 at the Oberon Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The theme of the event was, It Takes Guts.

So I went to grad school, thinking that I wanted to do abstract theory of how complex microbial communities form and how they live.

And abstract theory is what I got.

You know, the first three years I was there, I spent all this time working on my thesis, which was called a novel phylogenomic approaches to problems of microbial genomics.

And what I was doing was spending all this time building these theoretical models of how

the Earth was evolving three billion years ago and what kind of bacteria were living there

and whether or not they were breathing oxygen. I loved it, actually. I thought it was really

interesting. But I couldn't help but notice that no one around me really seemed to as well.

In fact, you know, I hit the nadir of grad school around year three, which I think a lot of people do,

when it occurred to me that I was spending all of this time working on something where I was trying to basically prove to only about 20 people in the world that I was a smart guy.

And that's terrible, right? You know, like you're boring, your friends, your loved ones, you're talking all the time about your research, which you're really into, and no one cares. And I made this

resolution kind of in private that, well, to solve this, I was going to assume, well, I was going to

...