Why Science Needs the Soul of a Poet

A Scientist's Take on Art, Empathy, and the Cellular Silk Road

There is something extremely poetic about touching a leaf dangling down from a willow tree—while you are walking to protect the intactness of your mind—and knowing exactly what this leaf is experiencing from the inside. It is looking for just the perfect amount of light, allowing it to penetrate its soul, deep into its chloroplasts, where light energy is captured and converted through a series of magical chemical reactions into simple sugar—something sweet that sustains its life until autumn. The leaf looks calm and serene, but because you are a scientist, you are able to reach out, feel its surface, and connect to it deeply by knowing exactly what it is invisibly going through. That is another form of empathy that is seldom talked about or taught to kids in school; we teach sports, observation, and science in different settings, never linking them together in an attempt to teach a child how to live in harmony with the world and accidentally fall in love with science.

I was once told by a person I consider extremely creative: “Creativity can never be work; it is play that is purely driven by curiosity.” Since she told me that, I have been thinking about how creativity has always been a part of my life as a scientist, and I started remembering the scientists who were considered highly creative—those who used creativity in their work as scientists. The first who comes to mind is Alexander Fleming, who used pigmented bacterial colonies to draw on solid culture media, pioneering what is now called “Agar Art.” It usually fascinates microbiology students when they are shown such pictures or when they get the chance to navigate through bacterial cultures and the basic concepts of practical microbiology by creating art in the lab. Even those who are forced to take microbiology in college would be immediately hooked if we started by teaching them how to inoculate bacteria on an Agar plate, and instead of beginning with the complicated word “inoculate,” we said “create art” or “paint using bacteria.” I have never seen anyone in academia so far using Alexander Fleming’s concept of merging creativity with science to express a deep and utter passion for their “work.”

Writing this blog entry also makes me think of how the best writers, in my opinion, are scientists. I was never able to sit through a full lecture on neuroscience without falling asleep, but I spent an entire night completely hooked on Oliver Sacks’s masterpiece, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. How Sacks turned some of the most complicated basics of neuroscience and real-life clinical cases into some of the most engaging literary short stories still surprises me to this day. Writing is a part of the scientific profession, but there are very few who actually write creatively and inclusively, using genuine human feelings and emotions to convey their logical experiments and conclusions. In this context, I cannot help but remember a book that changed my perspective on cell lines used in scientific research: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This book was written by Rebecca Skloot, a journalist who did amazing research on the cell line almost all of us scientists have used: the HeLa cell line. Beyond the research she presented, she gave science a voice. For the first time, I felt the human reality behind the HeLa cells and respected what Henrietta herself went through—the clothes she wore, the people she loved, the people she fed, and the ones who let her down. Skloot gave HeLa a human story and honored an aspect usually overlooked by scientific researchers: ethics.

If I were to reply to my creative friend—although this would be considered an extremely late reply, since she told me this two years ago—I would say that there is certainly a way to make space for creativity in your profession. If it weren’t for scientists molding creativity into their work, we wouldn’t know what a black hole looks like, how microfilaments work inside muscle cells, how heartbeats are synchronized into a rhythm responsible for life, how exactly we grow and develop from a single cell, or what the first humans on Earth might have looked like. If scientists were not creative workers, we wouldn’t have been able to enjoy sci-fi movies or even comedies. We wouldn't be able to imagine what extraterrestrial beings look like in Star Wars, nor would we appreciate how Rowan Atkinson uses his background in electrical engineering to calculate the precise, mechanical timing that allows Mr. Bean to smoothly escape a highly organized gang of Russian criminals. Our lives would have been extremely boring.

Imagine going into a biology class and, instead of sitting there for 50 minutes watching the teacher draw and write boring scientific facts, you are actually listening to a story of how cells resemble the universe: how life starts from a bunch of information entrapped in a ball of yarn you cannot even see (the nucleus); how there is a language cells understand that no one else can (proteins); how your DNA provides information not only about your hair color, but also your personality and whether you will love biology or be tortured by those extremely long 50 minutes. Imagine using the tiny bit of creativity you have to link life to scientific facts… Imagine the rough endoplasmic reticulum inside cells as the Silk Road connecting both ends of the world, facilitating the transportation of the most precious cellular products: proteins… Close your eyes and get lost in the maze of the mitochondrial intermembrane space, and observe how alien-looking enzymes generate power (energy stored as ATP molecules)… Push your creativity to its limits and believe that you—as Ali ibn Abi Talib once said, “You presume you are a small entity, while within you, the entire universe is enfolded”—are, without doubt, a walking miracle.

Written by Mariam K., PhD

Science Educator & Biology Tutor