Digital Thought Garden
Where my ideas are born, grow, and live their full lifecycle...
I write here to explore and make sense of what I think. Not to present conclusions, inform, or teach. Rather, to draw inferences, to learn, to understand...
Like everything else, my thinking changes. Just as I've changed compared to five years ago, so have my thoughts. This isn't a bug - it's how it should be. But most platforms push people to share polished, finalized ideas and resist this natural cycle. Social media and modern communication tools reward certainty. If you acknowledge uncertainty, you're seen as inadequate. Academic papers aren't much different - we're expected to present our work as if the path was always clear. And we can't update them. Publishing a new paper is possible, of course, but that requires much more comprehensive work, and small insights, newly gained perspectives mostly get lost without ever being shared.
Here, I aim to do something different. To show all this messiness, the lifecycle of thought and knowledge. Half-formed ideas, questions that needed following up but couldn't be pursued... Topics I'll probably start thinking about differently.
This matters to me - if I develop my thoughts in the open, in an incomplete, imperfect, changing form, someone might read them and tell me they disagree. I can re-read and gain different perspectives. And I can keep learning. This is crucial, exactly what I'm looking for.
Science actually works this way too, even if we pretend otherwise. Scientists who accept that knowledge is incomplete, who acknowledge uncertainties, are the real scientists. Those claiming certainty are either lying, don't know, or trying to sell you something. Pointing out limitations isn't weakness - it's what moves science and communities as a whole forward.
Reality is messier, and I prefer to show that messiness here.
What to Expect Here
Topics I think about:
- Aging biology and the microbiome
- Computational methods and causal inference
- Productivity, systems, tools
- Academia and mentoring
- Everything about life - whatever comes to mind
Also, the amount of notes you see here won't reflect how I spend my time. There are already outlets for scientific outputs - papers, review articles, talks... This space might evolve into a place where I explore other topics that benefit from thinking out loud. We'll see.
The Lifecycle of Notes
I'm trying to create an interesting concept - notes that are born, grow, mature, and perhaps even age. You'll notice different colors in notes, along with markers showing when they emerged. Some will be updated, some will stay as they are. Some will get a big I CHANGED MY MIND note added and maybe be recreated. This is part of the system I've built.
Who I Am
Handan Melike Dönertaş. A computational biologist who has shaped her academic life around the questions of why we age, whether it's possible to slow aging and extend healthy lifespan. I was born in Bursa, Turkey, did my BSc and MSc at METU, and completed my PhD at Cambridge. Currently, I'm leading my own research group at the Leibniz Institute on Aging in Germany.
Beyond that, I'm a serious learning enthusiast. If I could, I'd want to learn everything :) Learning new fields, new skills, new methods, new ways of thinking and living - not limited to my profession - is my biggest hobby. You'll probably see reflections of this in my thought garden as well.