Rhyme and reason

What hope have we to know ourselves, when we Know not the least things, which for our use be. Why grass is green, or why our blood is red, Are mysteries which none have reach'd unto. John Donne, "On the progress of the soul"How would John Donne react if he knew that his rhetorical questions about chlorophyll and hemoglobin, which he intended in a "when hell freezes over" sort of way, are actually now solved? Clearly, he believed that science and reason poison the soul; the take-home message from "On the progress of the soul" is that not only can't we know life's mysteries, but it isn't healthy to even try. For hundreds of years, poets have written about science. Yet according to poet Maurice Riordan and science writer Jon Turney, authors of A quark for Mister Mark, poets have traditionally stuck with two age-old themes: our place in the universe and the nature of our origins. More recent topics have taken time to move from the bench to poets' brains. Genetics is one topic that is starting to take prominence. At a recent London meeting about poetry and science held by the philanthropic organization Poet in the City, Michael Symmons Roberts read his science-inspired poetry. At times, he comes across as ambivalent; while he is clearly very interested in genetics, the words betray an edge of hostility. In his poem "Mapping the Genes," he likens the geneticist to a driver tearing through the desert in a "topless coupe," the helix "unravelled as vista / as vanishing point." The act takes the form of a cavalier desecration of nature.Symmons Roberts' disapproval is made explicit in "To John Donne," a homage to Donne's erotic poem "To His Mistress Going to Bed." In the original poem, Donne compares undressing his lover to the discovery of America. But in Symmons Roberts' version, the lover finds his mistress has already been violated -- by geneticists: "[H]er body is already mapped," and "her breast's / curve has a patent." Symmons Robert's antipathy may be fuelled by conversations he has had with Nobel Laureate John Sulston, an outspoken critic of gene patenting. Yet the poet also seems to object to the act of knowing itself -- as if complete description kills the beauty of life. "It's all mapped -- there is no new landscape," he laments in "Mapping the genes." Scientists occasionally cringe over some cases of "poetic license." When reciting his poem "The UV catastrophe," Riordan stated that Planck's constant is "precise, unlike pi" -- which had the epidemiologist next to me, Bill Hanage of London's Imperial College, bristling. He thought that much of the science/poetry relationship was one-sided and even parasitic. "Poets borrow language and ideas, but don't contribute to scientific understanding," he said. But I believe that scientists can benefit from poetry: Aside from the aesthetic experience it can provide, poetry can make people more aware of scientific issues. More practically, scientists are indebted to a key poetic tool, metaphors, which pop up all over their language: think of immune "battles", cytokine "storms," cell "factories," and molecular "cascades."At the London meeting held last month, poets, too, insisted that science is good for poetry, inasmuch as it continually provides new language and concepts for wordsmiths to play with. So do poets and scientists have anything in common? As a former physicist who did his Ph.D. in optoelectrics, the poet Mario Petrucci ought to know. He told the audience that both practitioners "pay the world their full attention, and bear witness." He put it best, perhaps, when he joked, "Science and poetry is not a marriage - but they do exchange theoretical fluids."Jennifer Rohn is a Research Fellow at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at University College London, and the editor of LabLit.com.What can science do for poetry, and vice versa? Tell us here.Jennifer Rohn mail@the-scientist.comLinks within this article:M. Riordan and J. Turney, A Quark For Mister Mark, October 2000. http://www.amazon.com/Quark-Mister-Mark-Faber-Poetry/dp/0571205429Poet in the City http://www.poetinthecity.co.uk/Michael Symmons Roberts http://www.symmonsroberts.comJohn Sulston as gene patenting critic http://www.whoownsyourbody.org/sulston.html
Bill Hanage http://www1.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/people/w.hanage/
M. Wenner, "The war against war metaphors," The Scientist, February 16, 2007. http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/52851
Mario Petrucci http://www.writersartists.net/petrucci.htmMRC LMCB http://www.ucl.ac.uk/LMCBLabLit http://www.lablit.com

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