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There is a case for including the study of poetry at the end of undergraduate
science courses. It’s not because science students are uncultured, nor because
they have so much spare time that they need poems to keep them occupied.
It’s more a preparation for the problems of life.

I’m not suggesting that, after a really tough day, young scientists
should settle down with a volume of Blake or Wordsworth and unwind amid
the burning tigers or daffodils. I always find a pint or a few rows of knitting
more effective. But if you have to spend much time reading or writing reports
and academic papers, looking for the poetry in them can lighten the task.

This interesting idea isn’t mine. I was at a conference a few months
back, and over dinner the conversation turned to the rigid format of the
scientific paper. Most of my fellow diners were academics who routinely
write at least one, and read hundreds, of papers a year, and they hate it.
They don’t like having their laboratory and field work divided into the
traditional sections of Experiments, Results and Analysis, because only
the most straightforward research work fits neatly into that pattern. But
to get your paper into the journal, you have to get it past the referees,
who decide whether the research is new and of scientific merit). So perhaps
it’s safer to stick to tradition.

An even stronger tradition in academic writing is the use of indirect
speech, such as ‘The test tube was heated with a Bunsen burner’ instead
of ‘We heated the test tube with a bunsen burner’. I came across this recently
in, of all things, an article in a DIY magazine, and it gave the article
a dream-like quality. It was about a flat which had been altered and redecorated,
and it really was about the flat – there was no mention of the people who
lived there.

As I read the article I imagined the flat taking on magical powers of
its own. Without the intervention of human effort, carpets of the right
shade sprouted from the floors and the walls flowered in harmony. ‘The base
colour of the bedroom was determined by the carpet,’ said the article. New
cupboards grew up like hedges in the bedroom, and beautiful furniture teleported
itself into elegant arrangements in the tasteful rooms.

Magic of this kind does not happen in the laboratory, and if it does
you know you’ve probably done something wrong. So why must researchers say,
‘The sample was tested at 50 °C,’ without admitting who actually did
it? I know the motivation for this is honourable. Experiments should be
repeatable and thus objective, so any trained researcher with the same equipment
should be able to reproduce the results, and saying ‘we did such-and-such’
could detract from this objectivity.

But I’m afraid I think it’s a bit dishonest to use indirect speech.
We all know who did the work – their names are at the top of the paper.
If I know any of the authors, I always have a picture in my mind of them
slaving over a hot furnace or whatever, as I read the paper. The picture
would be a bit more vivid if they wrote in terms of ‘we’. More informality
would breathe life into the academic journals. How about ‘Dr Jones spent
a couple of months working in Greece recently and suggested we try a technique
she learnt there’ ? This, after all, is how research actually happens.

Research is also driven and held back by politics and human relationships.
What researcher can honestly say they have never tried an experiment simply
because the boss said it wouldn’t work? And who wants to take part in scientific
collaboration if there’s a personality clash, or if the work is politically
sensitive? Since all research is affected by nonscientific influences, I’d
like to know a little about those influences in the research reports.

I expect to be slammed as a scientific heretic for these views. Researchers
wrote informally a century ago, but since then there’s been progress, hasn’t
there? Today’s authors know better than to write, as one of Nature’s correspondents
did on 12 May 1870: ‘Dr Neumayer has recently been in London, looking after
apparatus, and making arrangements, for the proposed Austrian expedition
preparatory to the one to the Southern Seas for the purpose of observing
the Transit of Venus in 1874. The object is one in which every English man
of science will feel a warm interest. The lethargy of our own Government
has been described by German astronomers and naturalists by the expressive
but not complimentary term ‘Philistinism’.’

It’s a bit wordy, but it’s not dry and boring, and you’d not have to
get a coffee halfway through reading the report just to keep yourself awake.
You can imagine him saying almost the same words to his friends in the pub
– or, more likely, over a glass of madeira in the parlour.

But what has all this to do with poetry? At the conference dinner we
were all agreed that academic papers could be a lot more lively. Just one
researcher said she appreciated the traditional rules and formality. ‘Writing
a paper is like writing poetry,’ she said. ‘You don’t just write down what
you did, as you would in a letter. You have to form the sentences to fit
in with the structure, like forming lines of a poem which scans. And the
form of a poem increases its interest, because it has rhythm and an appearance
that’s different from prose.’ It’s the best argument I’ve heard in favour
of formal scientific writing.

So why should final-year students study poetry? First, it will prepare
them for the formal reports they will inevitably have to read, whether as
research student or worker. And secondly, if they read a few of Wordsworth’s
mammoth poems, academic papers will probably seem like light relief.