Response to ‘Biology’
Rona Ramsay

My initial impression (the day I received the poem) of ‘Biology’ was that it lacked logic, the essence of science. The lack of logic made it alien to me as a written communication. It would never get past peer review by a picky scientist. Alienation came too from the use of words out of context, ‘lost in translation’ from science to poetry. Words such as ‘carnitine’, a specific recognition molecule in the cell, jumps out amongst the non-specific terms around it; abstruse nomenclature and central themes of molecular biology are mixed at random (Avogadro's Number in the midst of a proteomic verse).

Scientist and poet in the programme were given the impossible task of sharing, over one lunch, the sense of mystery and challenge of science and the sense of music and ideas in poetry, each in their own particular style. The time was much too short and our conversation could easily have stretch over several meetings when the opportunity to focus on issues and clarify connections would have been possible. I had expected the language of science to be a hurdle as it is to students new to biology but Robert took the dialect in his stride. When I explained the object I took (an automated pipette) as a symbol of measurement and precision, Robert likened it to a pen. On my side I learned that the mystery of poetry is that the connotations of words can be different for each reader, evoking different pictures from the same music.

So, on re-reading six weeks later, I found the literary logic. The poetry is there for me as a scientist, although perhaps in a different way from the general reader for whom the word associations do not evoke the associations and memories, the joy and challenge that science has given me over the 25 years of my adult life.

Not only have I learned from the poet-scientist discussions, but Robert Crawford has produced from the discussions a love poem for science. The words speak for themselves, evoking ‘recognition scenes’. My research seeks to explain how the three-dimensional shapes of small molecules fit together with large enzymes for recognition and affinity. In the end, ‘deft inter-molecular embrace’ sums up what my science is all about.