A microscope of my own

The microscope I brought home from Cairo.

I bought this microscope in the Qasr El Einy area of Cairo, a city close to my roots, and brought it back to Qatar despite the trouble of transporting it. I wanted an instrument of my own, one I could return to whenever a question occurred to me, without waiting for the next scheduled laboratory session.

The microscope stood on my desk in Qatar among books, notes and an American Chemical Society mug. On vacation mornings I could turn to it whenever I wanted. I could spend an hour following an observation simply because I was curious, with no fixed laboratory schedule to interrupt me.

That sort of freedom mattered to my education. At university, instruments came with protocols, schedules and good reasons for both. At home, the microscope gave my curiosity somewhere to go between those structured encounters. I could follow my own interests, return to an observation and learn to notice the difference between seeing something and knowing what it meant.

I could leave a slide on the stage, return to it later and keep examining the same preparation at home. It was no substitute for the instruments and controls of a research laboratory, but having a microscope within reach changed how I spent my own time. I had gone to considerable trouble to bring it from Cairo; by 2017, it stood on my desk in Qatar, ready whenever I wanted to look at something.