Srinagar, May 16 -- For most of my school life, science was something I memorized. Not explored. Not questioned. Just memorized.

We were taught to define terms, draw neat diagrams, and score well in exams. The system rewarded speed and accuracy: how quickly you could recall the structure of a cell or write down Newton's laws.

There was no time to stop and ask why anything worked the way it did.

That began to change when I stepped into a lab at the University of Kashmir. I was studying clinical biochemistry, and my assignment placed me in the Structural Biology Lab at CIRI, where I worked on proteins involved in building ribosomes.

Ribosomes are tiny structures inside our cells that produce proteins. But what struck me was this strange...