Molecules, metaphors and the place of science in culture

Science@Culture was a brave choice of name in 1995 by the pioneering science writer and broadcaster Mary Mulvihill. When she started her email bulletin – that later became a blog – it reflected the novelty and excitement of email at the time, recalls academic and science communicator Brian Trench.

She kept it going for 15 years; a single-handed labour of love, covering a vast range of activities. The 2009 summer edition had notices of a discussion of the big bang at the Alchemist Café, an imminent move of the much-loved Natural History Museum out of its Merrion Street home for renovations, a new book on evolution by Stephen Jay Gould and much more.

“The choice of name was not a random choice. The @ sign situates science within culture. Then and now, many other conjunctions and conflations are used; all with somewhat different connotations,” Trench suggests.

He considered the latest iteration of the Science@Culture debate last night brilliantly, coinciding with the announcement of the 2022 winners of the Mary Mulvihill science media competition for third-level students in an event at Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies – the first in a series of annual talks on science-culture interconnections.

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As anglophones we live with the unfortunate, enduring impact of the notion of "two cultures" more than our further-away neighbours in continental Europe. Writer and scientist CP Snow gets the blame, perhaps unfairly, for setting up this binary of literary versus scientific culture, Trench believes.

"Mary wrote on this topic in an Irish context, suggesting that partition hard-wired the divide into Ireland and contributed to the neglect of science in the Republic. This is a striking choice of metaphor, actually a dangerous one, as choices of metaphor often are. If there is a part of contemporary Irish culture that is openly hostile to science it is among the biblical-literalists of the northeast," he says.

Metaphors abound in the language of science providing the means to make the intangible tangible and thus capable of manipulation, Trench notes. “The codes, signals and information within DNA are metaphorical, but they are the staples of intra-scientific communication. The notion of double-helical DNA molecules containing a blueprint in four letters mixes metaphors. And DNA itself has become a ‘ruling metaphor of our age’ conveying a profoundly reductionist idea.”

And this goes beyond life sciences: in his book Helgoland, physicist Carlo Rovelli hesitates to use the term information in describing subatomic processes, because it implies meaning and intentionality. "At the heart of nuclear physics is a metaphor, the solar system model of the atom. In the life sciences, mechanical and militaristic metaphors are common," Trench points out.

To locate science in culture in this way is to see it become mainstream, as likely to be the topic of conversation as sport, food and weather

In public communication, intensity of metaphor use is heightened and so too are attendant dilemmas, he adds, and the information in DNA becomes the "Book of Life" or "The Selfish Gene", though this is not new. When Humphry Davy gave his science lectures at the Royal Institution in London and the Dublin Society in the early 19th century, he drew large attendances, which included novelist Maria Edgeworth and poet William Wordsworth, who were looking for inspiration in devising images.

We might think of such cases as expressions of culture in science, he says. When considering science in culture, “the culture is often taken to refer to [high] arts” and illustrations could include John Banville’s historical novels or Flann O’Brien’s atomic theory.

Within the realm of physics, plays like Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Brecht's Galileo centred on major controversial moments in the history of science, have been staged by Rough Magic Theatre Company. TCD physicist and poet Iggy McGovern marked Dublin's nomination in 2012 as European City of Science by asking 20 poets to come up with poems of 12 lines each on something to do with science. They all readily complied.

This kind of artistic engagement with science now goes under the name, art-science, and its genres are proliferating, Trench says. Recently on show in Derry and moving to Belfast is a 10km representation of the solar system with scaled models of the planets devised by author and artist Oliver Jeffers and astrophysicist Stephen Smartt.

Theoretical physicist and essayist Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond has edited a journal Alliage (culture, science, technique) for more than 30 years and spoken out against attempts to equate art and science and even more strongly against attempts to bring art into the service of science.

Our public discourse is permeated by science, whether it concerns infectious diseases, climate change, air quality, brain science or space exploration

This instrumentalisation is commonly found among scientists and science communicators. It is implied, at least, in the acronym, STEAM, where the A (arts) is embedded in the longer-established STEM. Dublin’s Science Gallery found ways of relating science and art which did not privilege one over the other, both being part of culture. “This is the appropriate way to approach the question,” Trench says.

Lévy-Leblond has written about the possible mise-en-culture of science. “To locate science in culture in this way is to see it become mainstream, as likely to be the topic of conversation as sport, food and weather. And there is some evidence that this is happening, whether or not it is specifically intended,” Trench says. So traces of scientific information and ideas can be seen in the comedy of Dara Ó Briain and in the work of others through spectacle, prime-time television and visual arts.

“These all indicate a notable increase and expansion of science’s presence in culture, along with the emergence through the pandemic of many more scientists as public figures, sometimes public intellectuals, occasionally even celebrities. Our public discourse is permeated by science, whether it concerns infectious diseases, climate change, air quality, brain science or space exploration.”

Observing this, he and colleague Massimiano Bucchi developed a concept of social conversation around science as a new way of thinking about science communication and science in culture. “This encompasses the deliberate and strategic programmes of state agencies and major institutions, events like next month’s Festival of Curiosity, but also the casual, everyday chat of thousands of citizens.”

There is, however, little or no science criticism within that realm. “Very few people ask publicly of science, whether in comedy or in radio chat, does this science matter? Is it worth doing? Does it make sense? What does it add to our knowledge of ourselves and the natural world? We take for granted that there are critics of theatre, literature, film and food. In a way the presence of such critics is a mark of being situated within culture.”

Trench hopes future Science@Culture talks will pursue exploration of these ideas including further scrutiny of the two-cultures divide in Ireland notably, the social standing of science in Ireland in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Received accounts of that period give little or no attention to science and imply the once “golden age” of science ended abruptly.

In her work on the establishment of the Natural History Museum cultural historian Sherra Murphy shows natural history was a significant part of the culture of the expanding educated classes into the late 19th century. But she also details how the museum suffered from the higher priority given in the new state to archaeological and historical collections in forming national identity.

"To be a Gaelic revivalist was not necessarily to oppose the natural sciences, there were personal connections," Trench says. Linguist-historian Eoin MacNeill, leader of the Volunteers and the first minister for education, was a friend of the physicist Arthur Conway and elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1915. Conway was a mentor to Eamon de Valera, who in one personality straddled the supposed divide. "There is a striking photograph of the attendance at a physics symposium in DIAS in 1942. There is Dev, front centre, with Conway at his side, and a couple of Nobel Physics prize-winners along the row. The ultra-nationalist in the company of cosmopolitan scientists."

He suggests the cultural divide may have been overdone in the subsequent telling of the story of the cultural, political and military struggle and the emergence of the new State.

Mulvihill commemorated

A plaque in memory of Mary Mulvihill was erected at her former home on Manor Street, Stoneybatter, in Dublin last November. It was funded by the Mary Mulvihill Association with support from the National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology.

“We celebrate Mary for her warmth and her humanity, but also for her passion. She was determined that Irish science should take its rightful place within Ireland’s national culture – it’s as much a part of the Irish cultural tradition as our poetry, our art and our music,” declared science broadcaster Leo Enright at the unveiling.