Two cultures

Bernard Dixon,
130 Cornwall Road, Ruislip Manor, Middlesex HA4 6AW, UK

The Lancet Infectious Diseases

Volume 7, Issue 5, May 2007, Page 308

The two cultures may seem an effete, irrelevant topic for discussion in a medical journal. Perhaps not, however, since the cultural divide is clearly alive and well in the English department at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Its manifestation there is an academic who asserts that governments use routine immunisation to disguise their failure to tackle real problems, and that neither this nor “genetically modified (GM)-tainted food” are products of science at all. These breathtaking absurdities appear in a book intended to foster dialogue between science and poetry.

The novelist-scientist C P Snow first highlighted the cultural schism in his 1959 Rede Lecture in Cambridge when he spoke of the polarisation between scientists and literary intellectuals. Separating the two domains, Snow saw “a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding”.

What bothered him especially was the ignorance of scientific ideas among arts folk of his day, with their narrow perspective on the world and their eagerness to condemn the cultural poverty of others. “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists,” he wrote.

“One or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: have you read a work of Shakespeare's?”

While arguments persist as to whether Snow exaggerated the problem, there are plausible reasons to believe that it has become less acute over the past half century. What, then, are we to make of John Burnside's ignorance of science, expressed with callow bravura in Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science?

The book itself (edited by Robert Crawford and published by Oxford University Press) grew out of events held at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. It is an engaging and illuminating collation, with 20 contributions by both poets and scientists in a range of specialties, from pharmacology to cybernetics. I was particularly drawn to the chapter by the radio-astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell. When giving popular talks, she has found that poetical imagery is a powerful complement to the factual portrayal of scientific data and concepts.

Burnside's offering is very different. Though decently written, it is essentially a re-hash of the critique of science, containing elements of veracity coupled with considerable naivety, which was popular in the 1960s and 70s. “It is in the interests of the corporations to propagate a fairly unquestioning view of (their version of) ‘science’ as good, beneficial, and life-enhancing, because it helps them to sell products that might otherwise seem entirely suspect to us”, he writes. “Like GM foods. Or ill-tested and carelessly manufactured vaccines”.

Offering no specific suggestions as to why we should be entirely suspicious of these things, Burnside next argues that one reason governments like science is because “they can cover up their failure to tackle root problems like poverty, exploitation, and environmental degradation with ‘scientific’ fixes and programmes, like mass inoculations or GM-tainted food aid. None of this is science, of course. It's business.”

Does this man not comprehend that mass inoculations, based on a wealth of scientific work, have ridded the world of smallpox—one of the vilest diseases ever to ravage humankind? Does he realise that hospital wards once housed patients, paralysed by poliomyelitis, who lived out their remaining years incarcerated inside iron lungs—a heart-rending spectacle now consigned to history by immunisation? What of terrible infections such as diphtheria, vanquished by vaccines resulting from innovation in both private companies and the public sector?

Would Oxford University Press publish a book in which I asserted that Shakespeare was not (of course) a playwright?

A very good letter to the Lancet.

The novelist-scientist Detente; Science Fiction.

p.s. Bernard Dixon, amongst other things, used to be Editor of New Scientist.