PRESIDENT'S LETTER

Bridging the Culture Gap

“Personal biosphere” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Although I had known for some time of C. P. Snow’s idea of “the two cultures”—science on one side of a “language barrier” and arts on the other—only recently did I actually read the original 1959 Rede Lecture (1) in which C. P. Snow laid out his thoughts. I encourage all of you to find and read a copy of this essay, which discusses some very interesting ideas not only about the two cultures—the topic I’ll focus on here—but also about the potential of science, including agriculture, to improve the basic human condition.

Baron Charles Percy Snow (1905–1980) was both a scientist and a writer. He described his basic premise in the Rede Lecture as follows: “I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups….Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists…. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension….” (As Snow explains later in the lecture, his use of “literary intellectuals” is meant to be iconic of the educated non-scientist—the writer, artist, historian, and so on.)

Without reading Snow’s original Rede Lecture, it might not be recognized that in the main he was exhorting the non-scientific community to become more scientifically literate, rather than the reverse. Here is a quote from his lecture that is amusing, yet also sobering, because, I believe, it remains as accurate in 2009 as it was 50 years ago. “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. Once 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? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.”

As could be imagined, Snow’s words fomented quite a debate both among his peers at Cambridge University and in the popular press, resulting in a large volume of commentary. In 1963, Snow wrote a follow-up article to his Rede Lecture entitled “A Second Look” (1). In this article, Snow addressed some of the controversy that his lecture had engendered, clarified some of his positions, and mused on some of the changes in science that had struck him since his original lecture in 1959. One point that he makes in “A Second Look” will be of interest to many ASPB members: he wishes that instead of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, he had used the field of molecular biology to query the educated non-scientist as to his/her knowledge of fundamental scientific ideas. As Snow writes, “I should now treat the matter differently, and I should put forward a branch of science which ought to be a requisite in the common culture….This branch of science at present goes by the name of molecular biology….This branch of science is likely to affect the way in which men think of themselves more profoundly than any scientific advance since Darwin’s….” I expect that many of us would be inclined to agree with Snow’s analysis of the impact of molecular biology on both the practice and the philosophy of science.

One of my own personal encounters with the “two cultures” is a conversation I had when I was an undergraduate, and it has stuck in my mind to this day. I was speaking with one of my friends, who was majoring in political science. When I mentioned that I was planning to go to graduate school in plant physiology, she replied “Oh. I didn’t even realize that plants had a physiology.” And so the culture gap continues, and I am sure that we have all encountered it.

What is to be done? In his lecture, C. P. Snow argued for changes in the educational system at the university level; I think most of us would contend that education and outreach efforts aimed at K–12 students and at the general public are of at least equal value. But, while it seems obvious that the answer is better education, what sorts of education would address this issue?

First, one indubitable need is factual education: Yes, Virginia (not the real name of my undergraduate friend), plants do have a physiology! This is the type of education that many of us offer in our own college- and university-level courses, and ASPB has made a number of valuable contributions toward this aim. For example, ASPB has developed “The 12 Principles of Plant Biology." These basic concepts—starting with “Plants contain the same biological processes and biochemistry as microbes and animals. However, plants are unique in that they have the ability to use energy from sunlight along with other chemical elements for growth. This process of photosynthesis provides the world’s supply of food and energy.”—encompass fundamental knowledge about plants that (analogous to the Second Law of Thermodynamics in physics) we believe any educated person should possess. ASPB Education Committee members Jeffrey Coker and Jane Ellis, along with Mary Williams (who recently became a features editor for The Plant Cell) have an Education Foundation GAP award to develop activities at the K-12 level that will accompany and illustrate each of these principles.

One further notion to think about when conveying factual information, especially to adult non-scientists, is whether it is worth trading off some specifics in order to convey information using more accessible language. For example, as plant biologists, we could give a fairly technical explanation of how fruit ripening occurs, and an educated adult would likely be able to grasp the general idea. However, we can ask ourselves whether that explanation, or the following explanation, taken from Victoria Finlay’s absorbing book, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2), is more likely to resonant and remain with a painter, a singer, or a dancer:

“The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering—or dancing or singing: the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe—in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red—meaning paradoxically that the “red” tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red. A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance—absorbing the red light and rejecting the rest, to give the appearance of a green tomato instead.”

Second, in addition to factual information, absolutely vital as it is, I think there is also a need to educate the non-scientist (and especially the young, potential future scientist) about the process of science, that science is itself a type of art. What I mean by this is that the process of scientific discovery, at the highest level, is at least as creative as the process of painting a portrait or writing a novel. What could be more creative than taking available knowledge and deriving from it some entirely new idea, and then imagining how one could experimentally test that new concept? It is the excitement of exploration and discovery that is so important to convey to K–college learners, and it is this aspect of science that is often lamentably absent from traditional textbooks.

Last, the third type of information that I would like to convey to Snow’s “literary intellectuals” is that art is—or is based on—science. To continue for a minute with examples from the world of color, I think it would be equally intriguing to an artist as to an ecologist to learn how the red dye cochineal is produced (2,3). Cochineal, historically used in oil paints and as a fabric dye and also used today in foods and cosmetics (it is also known as “carmine,” “crimson lake,” “natural red 4,” “C.I. 75470,” and “E120”), is derived from the body of a particular species of scale insect (Dactylopius coccus) when those insects feed on prickly pear cactus, giving rise to a whole industry of insect farming in parts of Central and South America.

A second example of how art is (or can be) interwoven with science is conveyed by the photograph that I chose to accompany this article: unique, interactive terrariums such as the one featured in the photo were part of an art exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) that my family and I visited last summer. To be more accurate, Mass MoCA described these installations by artist Vaughn Bell as “Personal Biospheres which give gallery visitors their own miniature landscapes to experience by popping their head into Plexiglas domes filled with small working ecosystems” (4).

Such information provides a path to reach out to those people who, by nature, by nurture, or by some G×E interaction thereof, lack, or believe they lack, any interest in or predilection for science. We can feel that we have successfully reached across the “culture gap” if we provide opportunities for such individuals to develop an appreciation for plants, even if we do not convey any factual knowledge about plant biology. ASPB is also supporting endeavors in this arena; for example, the ASPB-sponsored plant biology YouTube video contest, ChloroFilms, conceived and led by ASPB member Daniel Cosgrove, has two artistic videos—La Bloomba and Fertile Eyes—as major prize winners. As described in the ChloroFilms press release, Fertile Eyes, “a collaboration with Anna Edlund of Spelman College, combines music, dance, sensual imagery, and puns to tell the story of pollination and fertilization in plants in an unforgettable way” (5). I encourage all of you to take a look at these and other winners of the ChloroFilms contest.

After composing most of this article, I was gratified to read in Snow’s “A Second Look” a passage that parallels some of the thoughts I’ve been trying to develop here. In describing the fields of crystallography and structural biology, Snow noted, “What one needs most of all is a visual and three-dimensional imagination, and it is a study where painters and sculptors could be instantaneously at home.”

As C. P. Snow wrote in The Two Cultures, and as is still true in this, the golden anniversary year of his lecture, for better or for worse, the dominant or “common” culture of our time is not the culture of science. Accordingly, if we can imagine new ways to make painters and sculptors (not to mention journalists and political leaders) feel “at home” in the field of plant biology, those efforts may have at least as large an influence on the future of our discipline as our efforts to identify and train the next generation of plant scientists.

Sally Assmann
sma3@psu.edu

References

1. Snow, Charles Percy. (1965). The Two Cultures and A Second Look: An Ex­panded Version of The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
2. Finlay, Victoria. (2002). Color: A Natural History of the Palette. New York: Random House.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal.
4. http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=369.
5. “Winners of Plant-Biology Video Contest Announced by ChloroFilms.”