Science, poetry, funding and innovation

Two interesting articles in the Saturday Guardian struck me as worth mentioning. First, poet Ruth Padel, author of Darwin: a Life in Poems, talks about The Science of Poetry, The Poetry of Science:

"Poetry is about feeling, science is about facts. They're nothing to do with each other!" The A-level students in a school I visited last week were passionate on this point. Behind them was Keats, urging them on. "Philosophy," Keats said – meaning science – "would clip an angel's wings." Science was out to dissolve beauty, "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine – / Unweave a rainbow …" Edgar Allen Poe agreed. Science was a "vulture" that shrivelled wonder. "Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, / The Elfin from the green grass; and from me. / The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?" 

I think this over-romanticises both poetry and science, which have got on fine for two millennia and today are enriching their dialogue. Michael Symmonds Roberts's collection Corpus came out of a conversation with scientists mapping the genome. Jo Shapcott's collection Of Mutability is expanding poetry's audiences in the medical community.

Padel (who mentions Erasmus Darwin - see my previous post), sums up: "The deepest thing science and poetry share, perhaps, is the way they can tolerate uncertainty. They have a modesty in common: they do not have to say they're right. True, perhaps. Or just truer. "A scientist should be the first to say he doesn't know," a tiger biologist told me when I asked some detail of tiger behaviour. "A scientist goes forward towards truth but never gets there." (Read the full article here.)

This might not seem to be precisely the case if you head over to Philip Ball's article in another section of the newspaper, where he is bemoaning the conservatism of funding bodies:

The kind of idle pastime that might amuse physicists is to imagine drafting Einstein's grant applications in 1905. "I propose to investigate the idea that light travels in little bits," one might say. "I will explore the possibility that time slows down as things speed up," goes another. Imagine what comments these would have elicited from reviewers for the German Science Funding Agency, had such a thing existed. Instead, Einstein just did the work anyway while drawing his wages as a technical expert third-class at the Bern patent office. And that is how he invented quantum physics and relativity. 

The moral seems to be that really innovative ideas don't get funded – that the system is set up to exclude them.

As Ball says: "your proposal has to specify exactly what you are going to achieve. But how can you know the results before you have done the experiments, unless you are aiming to prove the bleeding obvious?" He talks about a new scheme being initiated by the US National Science Foundation to fund "'unusually creative high-risk/high-reward interdisciplinary proposals'. In other words, it is looking for new ideas that might not work, but which would be massive if they do." Read the full article here.

This fund, called CREATIV (not a very creative choice), might want to take some hints from poets about unknowns and uncertainties, perhaps?!  What are your thoughts - whether you are a poet, scientist or scientist-poet!

Sir Paul Nurse and Poetry

Photo: Royal Society

There were two great events held here in Bristol last night, one at the University and one at the Bristol Old Vic, and I was hoping against hope that I would find a connection between them to make this blog post flow! And... what do you know? I did. The first was Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, Nobel Prize winner, geneticist, president of Rockefeller University New York... all-round very very interesting scientist and excellent talker-about-science! He was giving the Sir Anthony Epstein lecture at the Wills Tower, in the largest, cathedral-like space, which was packed to the rafters... His topic was "Great Ideas in Biology" and he was quick to point out that these weren't THE great ideas in biology but his pick of great ideas... although he felt that most people would agree on 4 out of the 5.

So, what were his great ideas? Well: The Cell, The Gene, Evolution by Natural Selection, Life as Chemistry (and Physics) and the fifth, possibly contentious one, Biology as an Organized System, by which he meant looking at the biological networks and how they are structured, looking at the flow of "information", at the system as an information carrier.

It was all fascinating stuff, some of which I already knew a bit of, but always good to be reminded what a chromosome is, for example... with some great slides and historical perspective! I was then heading to a poetry event, so, I hear you ask, how are the two connected?? Well, it was at Great Idea Number 3, which you would assume centred around one Charles Darwin. But no, in fact Sir Paul wanted to focus on Charles' grandad, Erasmus, who was the first to talk about evolution (Charles later supplied the vast quantities of data to prove it). Not only that, apparently Erasmus - who was a colourful figure, so large that he cut an oval out of his dining table so he might sit rather nearer to his supper, and fathered 14 children - was a poet, at one time "one of the best known poets in England"! And not only that, he wrote much of his scientific reports in blank verse! (See Jenny Uglow on Erasmus Darwin's poetry in The Guardian). The Poetry Foundation gives us his poem, The Botanic Garden, and here is an excerpt:

 “You taught mysterious Bacon to explore

Metallic veins, and part the dross from ore;

With sylvan coal in whirling mills combine

The crystal’d nitre, and the sulphurous mine;

Through wiry nets the black diffusion strain,

And close an airy ocean in a grain.—

Pent in dark chambers of cylindric brass,

Slumbers in grim repose the sooty mass;

Lit by the brilliant spark, from grain to grain

Runs the quick fire along the kindling train;

On the pain’d ear-drum bursts the sudden crash

Starts the red-flame, and death pursues the flash.—

Fear’s feeble hand directs the fiery darts,

And strength and courage yield to chemic arts;

Guilt with pale brow the mimic thunder owns,

And tyrants tremble on their blood-stain’d thrones.

Stirring stuff! Now the poets I went to see after this lecture, Luke Kennard and Tom Philips,  did not deal directly with biology but I feel that Erasmus D would have enjoyed the evening, which moved from a searing critique/love poem about Portishead to a tale of the Murderer being taken for a haircut. I was immensely impressed by the whole event, organised monthly by Word of Mouth -  highly recommended if you are in the vicinity!

So, an evening of poetry, biology and biological poetry, what more could I have wanted?

Poetry and Extremophile DNA

Fascinating small article in today's Observer entitled "How does a poet ensure his work lives for ever?":

Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realised, it all comes down to the durability of your materials. Bök has written a poem, "The Xenotext", which he is inserting into the DNA of a particularly resilient form of bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans. This extremophile bacterium can survive exposure to cold, dehydration, acid and vacuums, meaning it could live on in outer space should the Earth cease to exist.

Bök is not one to shy away from a challenge. In his most recent book, Eunoia, each chapter uses words of only one vowel. He has spent nine years researching the Xenotext project and, despite having no academic training in biochemistry, he is doing all the genetic and protein engineering himself. Using a "chemical alphabet", Bök is translating his short verse about language and genetics into a sequence of DNA, which will be implanted into the genome of the bacteria. The protein that the cell produces in response will form a second comprehensible poem.

This is not the first time someone has married art and microbiology. In 2003, US scientists inserted a DNA translation of the song "It's a Small World" into D radiodurans to show that the bacterium could be used as a means of information storage in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. Last year, the American genetic entrepreneur J Craig Venter coded a line from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life" – into DNA, only to receive a cease-and-desist letter from the notoriously litigious James Joyce estate.

Let's hope Bök will have fewer problems with "The Xenotext". He is now in the final stages of coding and a model of the protein goes on display with the two poems at the Text festival in Bury from 30 April.

 Interesting stuff... here's the original article, if you want to comment.

Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge: Science-inspired fiction and poetry open mic night!

A wonderful time was had by all last night at the Grant Bradley gallery at the University's Changing Perspectives science-inspired fiction and poetry open mic night. I was host for the evening and, to kick the whole thing off, read my stories Experimentation (from the lab coat I'd written the story on for the Changing Perspectives exhibition) and Healing Wounds.

I was then more than delighted to hand the mic over to 14 readers, who read short stories, poems and excerpts from longer works, all in some way taking science as their starting off point. We moved from oxo cubes to cockroaches, aspirin to drowned cities, speculative Wessex fiction to gifted children, Brian Cox (!) to Pingu the penguin.

I have to say that I don't know about anyone else but I found it all extremely inspiring! We had such a range of readings, across many "genres" (although I hate labels), different styles and tones and subject matter. I loved it all: thank you to Jo, Cath, Stewart, Mary, Mazzy, James, Caleb, Amy, Franca, Tom, Colin, Gavin, Andy and Katrina!

Becky Jones - PhD student from the biochem lab I've been embedded in and organizer of the Art of Science competition - and I had the impossible task of picking just four people to give these wonderful books (above) to, so congrats to Jo, Caleb, Amy and Franca - but really congratulations to everyone, it was a wonderful celebration of using science as inspiration, whether you have any scientific background or not, none is necessary. As Einstein said: Imagination is more important than knowledge. I think he would have enjoyed last night.

There's Science in My Fiction... And Poetry

I'm running this event tomorrow night at the British Science Festival in Birmingham - come along if you're in the area! It's free... no need to book.

There's Science in My Fiction... And Poetry

 7-10pm, Wed 15th Sept, The Old Joint Stock Function Room

"What if..?" ask both scientists and fiction writers. What if a gene mutates? What if she never married him? Science is fabulous inspiration for fiction - come read out your science-inspired stories and poems to win great prizes, including a Focus magazine subscription and champagne. Science-inspired authors Tania Hershman, Sue Guiney and Brian Clegg will judge. Put some science in your fiction!

More details here.

Genomics Forum Poetry Competition 2010

I'm delighted to pass on details of a poetry competition seeking poetry inspired by genetics and genomics. Here it is:

The Genomics Policy and Research Forum is delighted to announce a brand new writing competition for budding poets in partnership with the Scottish Poetry Library.

‘improving the human’ - Humanity+poetry
The human genome has been unravelled and mapped. Genes responsible for different illnesses and conditions are being identified. Will this information improve the human and help us avoid disease and death? And does this desire to be perfect mask something more sinister – a lack of empathy for the imperfect?  Will this lead to a genetic divide between rich and poor? Do we even want to live for ever? Or, like the Sibyl, do we think that death gives life its meaning?
Thomas Hardy was inspired by germ plasm theory (the forerunner to genetics) to write ‘Heredity’;

… that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.

Are you similarly inspired?

BriefWrite a poem of no more than 50 lines on the theme of ‘improving the human’.
Rules

• The deadline for entries is 7 October 2010 (National Poetry Day)

• The judges are Gwyneth Lewis (Wales’s National Poet 2005-06), Peggy Hughes at the Scottish Poetry Library, and Professor Steve Yearley, (director of the Genomics Forum)
  
• Poems should not have been published or accepted for publication elsewhere

• Entrants can be of any nationality. Entrants can only submit one poem.

Send your poems to pippa.goldschmidt@ed.ac.uk
Please send your poem as an attachment to your email, and ensure that the attachment contains only the poem and poem title (if using a title) but no other identification. In the body of the email, please list your name, contact details and poem title (or first line of poem, if you do not wish to give it a title).

Results
Winners will be contacted in November 2010 and a list of winning entries will be posted on the Genomics Forum website by the end of November.
A selection of the winning and shortlisted poems will be published in a special publication of the Forum in 2010.
The Scottish Poetry Library will host an evening of poetry readings based on the winning entries.
First prize is £500, second prize is £200, and third prize is £100.

Copyright
Copyright remains with the author, but the Genomics Forum has the right to publish winning poems on its website and in a special publication.