POET Gillian Ferguson has spent five years mapping the human genome project in verse, learning along the way that we share 99 per cent of our genetic make-up with mice and have the genes for a tail. SUSAN MANSFIELD reports.
THANKS to Burns, the mouse has a confirmed place in Scottish poetic tradition. But when poet Gillian Ferguson looks at a mouse, she sees not Rabbie’s “timorous beastie” but a creature whose genes are 99 per cent like those of a human being.
“We h
ave the genes for a tail, you know,” she says cheerfully, just one of the many things she learned in the past five years while writing a book of poetry about the human genome project. “For all the things I found out, it was the closeness of the connection to the rest of the natural world that really blew me away. Do you know, we share 75 per cent of the same genes as a pumpkin?”
This sense of connectedness has become a major theme in her writing project, which is launched this week on the internet. The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life is a marathon project in which poems are interwoven with quotations from scientists and thinkers. In print, it would run to 1,000 pages in full, though a printed volume of extracts is planned later.
“The computer has allowed an amazing freedom and it enables me to reach out further than the average volume of poetry,” Ferguson says.
The project has the support of leading scientists, including Sir John Sulston, leader of the UK Human Genome Project, and Francis Collins, his counterpart in the US, who describes the work as “truly awesome… a numinous tapestry of poems, quotes and profound musings on life, science, God and the genome.”
“The science is so fantastic, in the true meaning of the word, it was genuinely hard to leave it go. By the time I’d finished it I couldn’t believe how long it was. As it’s on the internet, I can update it, but I’m having to tie my hands at the moment – I need to get on with my life!” says Ferguson.
Ferguson’s acclaimed first book of poetry, Air for Sleeping Fish, was published in 1997, but she is probably best known for Baby, a collection of poems written in a spell of feverish creativity immediately after the birth of her son, Comrie. He is now nine and, Ferguson says, looking forward to his mum spending less time on the human genome.
But she suspects it was the miracle of birth, “that bringing a life out of nothing”, which inspired her towards even bigger questions of existence. She admits she’s no scientist – “I gave up O-Grade chemistry when it started to get impossible” – and went on to do a degree in philosophy. But, in 2002, she received a £25,000 Creative Scotland Award to work on a book of poems about the human genome.
She was struck that scientists working on the project tended to describe their work in poetic terms: “‘The handwriting of God’ is a very high-flown phrase to hear in the 21st century. Most modern poets would run a mile before they would now use the words ‘miracle’ or ‘God’ and here were scientists bandying them around.
“It was clear they were trying to convey the science by metaphor because the science itself is fearsomely difficult. And I thought, why shouldn’t a poet go in and offer some kind of added vision?”
It’s not hard to see why it would appeal. “What’s so brilliant is that at its core it’s very simple. The idea that life is created from these four chemical letters, A, C, G and T in combinations of three – that to me is staggering. That four billion years of evolution has shuffled these around to create someone’s eyes, or a child’s face, that’s so fabulous.”
She undertook a crash-course in basic science, however, beginning with science books and radio programmes and graduating to specialist papers. The poems aren’t overburdened with science, but they are imbued with the sense of what the discoveries might mean, illuminated by the imagination.
Poetry, she says, can provide a way in for lay people to these momentous discoveries. “The science has become so specialist that even scientists from other fields find it hard to understand. But it’s not good enough for us to sit there and say, ‘I can no longer contend with this, I might as well watch reality TV.’ This is going to have immense implications for medicine and society for the future.
“There is a sense of duty to try to contend with it, and I think art offers a way to do that by allowing you to glimpse something of what that science actually means, something that lights up the meaning of it in a way that most people’s minds can understand. In this case, poetry is a particularly good language to explore it.”
After getting to grips with the basic idea of genome mapping, she followed her creative nose in a variety of directions, from GM crops to cloning – Dolly the Sheep gets a few verses of her own – to issues facing the environment to the actions of drug companies who have patented parts of the genome so they own the rights to any related gene therapies.
With her philosopher’s hat on, Ferguson sees there is a danger of the science running ahead before ethical considerations can catch up. “It’s like a car boot sale, where people are grabbing bits of the genome,” she says. “Everything is about division, and everything I’ve seen about the human genome is all about unity and connectedness.”
Our genetic connectedness to the rest of the natural world has refuelled her concerns for the environment. “I think this explains the feelings of love we have for the natural world. There’s an awareness that may have been written off as a hippy, tree-hugging thing, but science is coming to show us that we are, literally, as one. It explains more about why we feel the way we do about the planet.”
One surprising dimension is the way in which her poems often turn towards the notion of a God, a “poet” writing the poem of the human genome, “breathing life” into earth and water. She sees nothing contradictory about God and science, though she says she has come to see Him more as “a creative force” than the “stern, boring” God of her Church of Scotland upbringing.
“What made the first gene coagulate? Whether you call that evolution or miracle, that’s all the same to me. I believe totally in evolution, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for a creative force in the universe, or that the aesthetic dimension of life doesn’t matter. When you come face to face with the mysteries of life, the intricacy and the beauty – to say that’s just a bunch of scientific facts doesn’t do it justice.”
It’s a relief to have the project finished at last, though she admits one section is not as complete as it might be. That is thanks to the mice who shared her cottage in the West Highlands and devoured a box of research notes and papers from the bottom up. The mice with whom we now know we share 99 per cent of our genes. Perhaps now they know that too.
&149 The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life is at w
ww.thehumangenome.co.uk Extract from Human Genome
The Human Genome is a poem,
conjured syllable by syllable –
such agonising millennia
from light, water, earth –
such agonising millennia
for the red word of the heart;
rehearsing skin with lilies -
learning body from amoebae,
coagulation of a scripted cell,
through worm and fish,
lizard, bird and shrew –
to the last iris crinkle, hair scale,
spiral print at the tip of a finger –
a billion years to write the eye
from flowers’ pupil-mouths –
star-bone hands from leaf palms -
define pterodactyl wings to fingers;
achingly dyeing first seas, water,
into mysteries of blood and tears.
© Gillian Ferguson
