For the Love of Science

Howdy ho! I am Jenga, one half of the Love & Science Labs duo. I have come to the world of hemp laboratory science and product formulation in a somewhat meandering fashion. Always, for me, the goal has been to find my place in the world of health and healing while utilizing my science nerdery to guide the way. And so I looked at it from nearly every angle along the way. To say I loved school would be an understatement. My journey lead me through biology, to chemistry, on to organic and biochemistry. All in the interest of beginning a career in a medical profession before choosing to study to become a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP). Nutritional Therapy checked all of the boxes for me. A desire to help others understand their bodies on a deeper level, to become in-tuned with the. That alongside a need to really understand the movings and shakings of the human body from both a whole system as well as a biochemical perspective. I found my voice in that world through education. The world of health and especially nutrition is littered with garbage science and anxiety inducing marketing by the various nefarious food lobbies. Gaining a more complete understanding of the way our lifestyle choices interact with our biology empowers us to make better decisions in support of our bodies. That is pretty cool, right?

As I meandered into the role of Hemp CBD Laboratory science, I view it all from the same perspective. Health and healing from a biochemical perspective. How can we better support and collaborate with our biology instead instigating and antagonizing it? How can we choose to offer our bodies the compounds needed to bring balance and ease? The better I can understand cannabinoid science and how the body interacts and responds to phytocannabinoids, the better equipped I become to share that journey with others. So that is what I aim to do with this blog. As a lab tech I am always interacting with the chemistry of cannabinoids.

I have always been and will always remain a science nerd at heart. It is in my very nature to contemplate the hows and whys of this planets great offerings, while appreciating the vastness of the unknown. My brain regularly grapples with its own inherent dichotomy. I am simultaneously limitlessly openminded and a hard headed, earthbound skeptic. I hold space for the reality that we humans are but a blip, and as such the totality of our scientific explorations amount to understanding the nature of a grain of sand on the infinite beach of reality. I also find myself bound to gaining access to belief through understanding things on a fundamentally scientific level. Logically, I know that science is always 1000 steps behind. It is always playing catch as we discover the intricacies of how things work. For example, academia just recently started to venture down the path of studying the biological and psychological effects of meditation, of which there are many. But this in no way means that the myriad benefits of meditation waited for science to justify them before gifting themselves to those that choose to study the nature of their own breath. Meditation has been practiced in various forms the world over for many thousands of years. Our meditating ancestors didn’t require our modern scientific method to prove to them that they were supporting a healthy heart, mind, and connection to the universe. Experience was enough. The very same can be said of our human affinity for the medicine of the cannabis or hemp plant. All of this is to say that I easily hold these two perspectives to be true.

I am a scientist. My brain understands my own experience better when I understand the molecular and physiological interactions that coordinate the processes that make up a human life. I question everything and am skeptical always. But I also know that a lack of academic research on interactions of cannabinoid molecules with the human body does not mean that they aren’t taking place. It points more to political restrictions and a lack of exploration, or that we haven’t developed the technology and procedures with which to measure such things. We are always 1000 steps behind. Science is so slow. Hurry up science! Thanks to the study of the cannabis plant we have discovered the endocannabinoid system. 30 years later we are still at the very beginning of our education about this medicinal human companion.

I honestly find a great deal of beauty and pleasure in this in between place. I really want science to break down all of the mysteries of the universe. Contemplating the universe through the lens of chemistry, biochemistry, biology is my shit. This brain was blessed with an aptitude for these things. But everything that science has never and maybe will never explain gives me an awesomely expansive feeling. A sense of wonder will keep you young forever!