Response to the poem ‘The Organ Bath’
Alison Gurney

Having failed to think of a “provocative” object that could be safely taken from my laboratory to lunch, I took along a sheet of images of blood vessel preparations labelled with fluorescent markers when I met with David Kinloch. The images were representative of my main research interest, which is the mechanisms controlling the diameter of blood vessels in the lung and thereby regulating pulmonary blood pressure. David had read my web page in advance of the meeting and had a number of questions about its content. In conjunction with the images, these questions led the initial discussion, mainly about the nature of my research. After lunch I gave David a brief tour of my laboratories, where he saw a range of technologies used to investigate various aspects of blood vessel function. It is interesting that he chose to write about the organ bath, which is a double-walled, glass chamber through which warm water circulates to maintain isolated, intact organs (e.g. blood vessels) in an environment close to that found in the body. The organ bath does not represent the mainstream of my research, which is on individual cells removed from vessels, but it has an important use in establishing the physiological significance to the intact vessel of our findings at the single cell level. Moreover, the organ bath is the classical tool of the pharmacologist and has been instrumental in the discovery of many widely used therapeutic drugs.

Before our meeting I had little interest in poetry and had not read any since school, but I was curious to see what a poet would make of what we do. Although I was unable to read David’s poetry before our meeting, I could see from his web page that science is not among his usual choice of subject matter and he later confirmed that his participation in science also ended with school. Nevertheless, the meeting was productive, resulting in a lighthearted poem initially 237 lines long. We discussed the use of language in science. Although this included specialised scientific terminology, David also pointed out common words used in a scientific context where the meaning was not obvious. This interest in language is evident in his previous poetry and in his poem about the organ bath, where words and concepts associated with different aspects of my research are connected in unusual ways and “organ” is explored in different contexts. It is interesting how these connections are made. Although the first 12 lines deal with scientific concepts, the poem then diverges into a musical theme, returning to science again at the end. Such freedom to change direction is not afforded to the scientist, who works in an increasingly focused way. I perhaps gained most insight into the process of creating poetry from the long version of David’s poem, where the flow between ideas was more gradual and detailed. My feeling is that scientists and poets both make use of lateral thinking in formulating ideas, but otherwise they work in quite different ways.