I should have loved biology
There is a large gap between the mechanisms of chemistry and the magic of biology that most people do not see closed until late in their education. It's a real shame that this gap cannot be closed sooner.<p>In undergrad I took a bunch of biology and chemistry classes.  It wasn't until I took Biochemistry (a senior level class) that everything came together. The biochemistry class I took was a re-telling of all the stories you learned in molecular biology but with the tools you acquire in organic chemistry.<p>Equipped with those tools I relearned the Krebs cycle and photosynthesis as real chemical reactions that make sense rather than a chain of facts to be memorized.<p>The class left me with a deep and profound reverence for life.  Every process in a cell has a mechanism that can understood with chemistry. However, the magic of life exists where those processes come together and interact in incredibly complicated ways.<p>It's seductive to think that we should be able to tease apart this complicated processes and figure out how "life" works, and maybe someday we will.  However, it's easy to underestimate the level of complexity and interconnectedness in these systems.<p>Many of us understand how hard it can be to debug a distributed system. Imagine trying to reverse engineer a distributed system with tens of thousands of interconnected services and messaging queues that all just sort of evolved and were not built with clean engineering practices.