{"id":1028,"date":"2014-04-07T08:48:13","date_gmt":"2014-04-07T08:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/?p=1028"},"modified":"2014-04-02T17:26:18","modified_gmt":"2014-04-02T17:26:18","slug":"lab-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/2014\/04\/07\/lab-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Lab Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wadd<\/a>I have recently been reading about the \u2018What Scientists Read\u2019 project, which aims to explore the influence of literature and the arts upon scientific thought and practice. The project has interviewed scientists across the Scottish Central Belt with a view to establishing what their literary predilections and influences are, analysing the different genres discussed and their impact upon scientific work. This project reminded me of a draft of an article in our archived papers of\u00a0Conrad Hal Waddington<\/a>, the developmental biologist, embryologist and geneticist who was Director of the Institute of Animal Genetics, Edinburgh and Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh from 1947-1975. The article, titled \u2018What I Was Reading, Fifty Years Ago\u2019, was published under the title \u2018Fifty Years On\u2019 in Nature<\/i> (Volume 258, Issue 5530, pp. 20-21) in November 1975, two months after Waddington\u2019s early death. The draft typescript, marked with Waddington\u2019s annotations and crossings-out, outlines some of his main literary influences during the years 1925-30 when Waddington was aged 20-25. This was at a time before seminal works by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound changed the face of modern poetry, so Waddington at this time favoured \u2018the English poets of the generation of Wilfrid Owen.\u2019 He also had a keen interest in philosophy. From an early age, Waddington was heavily influenced by the philosopher A.N. Whitehead, lamenting that Whitehead \u2018scarcely gets mentioned\u2019, except in the context of being Bertrand Russell\u2019s co-author of Principia Mathematica<\/i>. Whitehead\u2019s influence on Waddington strongly influenced his way of looking at the world, particularly his opposition to a division between mind and matter. Waddington felt that Whitehead \u2018inoculated\u2019 him against \u2018the present epidemic intellectual disease, which causes people to argue that the reality of anything is proportional to the precision with which it can be defined in molecular or atomic terms.\u2019<\/p>\n

Waddington was also intrigued by thinkers who \u2018brought literary criticism and philosophy very near together\u2019, such as I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden. \u2018I doubt\u2019, Waddington muses, \u2018if, today, you would find anywhere the intimate interplay between poetry, philosophy and the foundations of science, which Ogden and Richards displayed.\u2019 Waddington\u2019s admiration for this interplay mirrored his own wide-ranging interests. From folk dance and music to art, architecture, ecology, computer science, robotics and more, science for Waddington was always closely integrated within, and informed by, all aspects of man\u2019s life in society and upon earth. What comes across throughout the article is Waddington\u2019s feeling that the flexibility of his interests was partly a product of his time: \u2018[i]t was absolutely natural to have interests in philosophy, poetry, even painting, and to allow them to show. This was well before<\/i> there was considered to be any firm dividing line between the natural or the moral sciences, or even between those and the Arts.\u2019 This \u2018dividing line\u2019 between the arts and sciences, famously discussed in a famous 1959 lecture \u2018The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution<\/a>\u2019 by C.P. Snow (incidentally a Cambridge colleague of Waddington\u2019s) is one of the things which the current \u2018What Scientists Read Project\u2019 is attempting to combat. Waddington\u2019s article provides an intimate glimpse into his intellectual background and how literature influenced his personality and his approach to science. No doubt \u2018What Scientists Read\u2019 will provide similar valuable insights as it progresses; I look forward to seeing the results.<\/p>\n

More information on \u2018What Scientists Read\u2019 here:\u00a0http:\/\/www.whatscientistsread.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Clare Button,\u00a0Project Archivist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have recently been reading about the \u2018What Scientists Read\u2019 project, which aims to explore the influence of literature and the arts upon scientific thought and practice. The project has interviewed scientists across the Scottish Central Belt with a view … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2,116],"tags":[196,191,197,190,195,198,155,194,199,192,193],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p40Aqf-gA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1028"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1032,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028\/revisions\/1032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}