I grew up in Mexico city, in a strange and oddly academic family of atheists. I grew up atheist in the way most Mexican Catholics grow up catholic: by default. Neither my parents nor my grandparents ever mentioned god or miracles.

I had a friend as a kid, and I would sleep over on Saturdays, which is how I was exposed to the church. We would attend Mass on Sunday morning, where I heard about how fear and love of God where the same thing, and I learned how Jesus had died to save us.! It all seemed rather boring, and predictable. Like a marvel movie, Jesus and god would always save the day.

I grew up and by mistake, became a scientist. It didn’t come easy–mexican kid goes to upstate new York is a bit of a culture shock. The term miracle was unnecessary back then–logic sufficed to explain everything that has happened or ever will happen. I became very well acquainted with numbers. In particular, I loved the prime numbers, with their incomprehensible, unpredictable sequence, they gave me peace and quiet on busy days: 2,3,5,7,11,13….

By the end of college, I knew I was hooked. Not on the cold, mind you, bu

Here’s the thing though, about becoming a scientist, especially a biologist. Our daily life is, today, regular, boring and predictable on the surface, just like the miracles I was taught about in the bible, just like the marvel movies. And the deeper you go, the more regular and predictable the world becomes. For example, when a cell divides, it is so good at it’s job that it only copies the wrong thing once every 100,000 DNA letters.

Put another way, your cells don’t make a mistake 99.9999% of the time.

In the middle of my scientific training, I faced disillusionment. The world, I thought, was perfect, regular, predictable, boring. if you played the movie again you’d get the same damn thing out again. I had grown up in a world of colors and smells and flavors, but science told me that most of the time, everything behaves in the same way. There is no room for wonder in perfection.

Then one day it hit me. You know what wasn’t predictable? The mistakes! Yes, your cells only make a spelling mistake 0.00001% of the time. When you see a mistake, a flaw, an imperfection or an irregularity, it’s a miracle. I am privileged to have seen it.

Slowly, my eyes began to adjust to this new way of looking at the world. See, here’s the thing: our world is utterly and completely regular the great majority of the time. But it’s only this way because happy little mistakes accumulated into a perfect and regular structure. If cells didn’t make mistakes, they wouldn’t evolve, they wouldn’t change, they wouldn’t make the amazing colors and structures that surround us these days. We would still be at the bottom of a hydrothermal vent. Each mistake that built our world was so incredibly rare, and it happened at just the right time. It dawned on me: mistakes are miracles!

I decided then that I knew I wanted to devote myself to the study of miracles, their properties, their patterns. For me, science isn’t the study of regularity, it’s the study of what happens when we break the pattern, when we insert a small miracle into a system that doesn’t have them.

Some days, when I am feeling blue, I feel boring and sad. Life, it strikes me, is boring and simple. In those rainy days when I can’t go outside, I tell the world, “go ahead, keep pretending like miracles don’t happen.” I like the raindrops to believe that they have convinced me of their regularity, that they can hide their beauty from me The truth is, I’m a scientist, and I study miracles. Those raindrops pit patter against a canvas of unique coincidences that give flavor to life. They may seem regular, but i have faith that there’s a miracle hiding within them.