Anxiety and awe

ANXIETY AND AWE POEMS ABOUT BIOENGINEERING

NRP-UEA 2015 with POETS FROM THE WRITERS’ CENTRE NORWICH and THE SCIENCE ART AND WRITING TRUST

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Catherine Woodward studied for both her BA (English Literature and Creative Writing) and MA (Studies in Fiction) at the University of East Anglia. She is a poet and promoter living and working in Norwich and runs the poetry blogzine Bad Robot Poetry.

Farhan is a biological scientist currently midway through his undergraduate studies at the University of East Anglia. He has wide-ranging interests in biology, from evolutionary biology to molecular biology to science communication and intends to pursue a career in research science. In his spare time he enjoys writing and performing stand-up comedy.

Julia Webb is a poet, editor, creative writing tutor and a creative coach living in Norwich. Julia is one of the editorial team The Lighthouse – a journal for new writing published by Gatehouse Press.

Julia’s poetry has appeared in Magma, The Rialto, Poetry Salzburg Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Other Poetry, Poetry News, The Interpreter’s House South, Ten Poets: UEA Poetry 2010 amongst others. Julia has been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize (2008 and 2009), highly commended in The Yeovil Prize (2009), commended in the Poetry-next-the-sea poetry competition (2012) and was runner up for the Cafe Writers’ Norfolk Commission (2009 and 2011). In 2010 she won an Arvon 42 Grant and in 2011 she was awarded a Malcolm Bradbury Continuation Grant from UEA. In 2011 she won The National Poetry Society Stanza Competition with her prose poem Lent. Julia’s first full poetry collection, Bird Sisters, will be published by Nine Arches Press in 2016 Flavia is a second year biomedicine student at the University of East Anglia that discovered a passion for making agarose gels thanks to iGEM! She is interested in health and medicine and how new technologies such as synthetic biology can be used to approach new preventative, diagnostic and curative methods for diseases. Outside the lab, travelling and photography are a must and in her free time she also plays the piano. In 5 years time she sees herself working in research and medicine alongside starting her own colourful agarose gel business!

Josh is a computing science student at the University of East Anglia. He was particularly excited, and nervous, to be a part of iGEM as biology, more specifically synthetic biology, is a completely new field of study for him. He has a fascination with data structures and algorithms, programming, and computer graphics. He is tailoring much of his third and final year towards bioinformatics. In the future he would be interested in doing a PhD in the algorithmic aspects of bioinformatics.

Nicola is a molecular and synthetic biologist interested in the natural and engineered transfer of genetic material between genomes of different species. Leader of the Synthetic Biology group at The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) and an investigator in OpenPlant, Nicola designs and develops molecular tools to engineer plant genomes and produce novel functions in plant cells. As a bioengineer, Nicola is interested in the societal impacts of synthetic biology and the complex intellectual property issues that surround genetic sequences, DNA and natural products. She is an advocate of open-source tools for biology and of women in STEMM. Kieran is a biological scientist, and our resident grumpy old man. He’s had an affinity for biology ever since ingesting a bit too much dirt as a child (there was no obvious harm caused).

So far in his undergraduate career he’s dabbled in topics spanning a wide range of the biological sciences; including population ecology, microbiology and science communication.

In the future, Kieran hopes to apply this multi-disciplinary approach to carve out a career in public health; specifically in infectious disease epidemiology.

Leda is a biomedicine student at the University of East Anglia. Science has interested her ever since she was a child and learning that a heart doesn’t actually look like what the cartoons suggest. She has an international background, with Italian and Dutch parents, born in America, living in Singapore and China before moving to England (which can make even the most basic questions like “Where are you from?” difficult to answer). In the future Leda hopes to travel around the world, as well as pursue a career in research of biomedical science.

Mother in Garden: a portrait to be impersonal flourish of cells and over there the hibiscus all so where when you get the void that binds or love such as in this poem the flower extends the arm that the flower is not the arm Mother, be weather be stickle brick, picture so where and with love all being in the air like radio, like rain - Catherine Woodward

Protocol It means using time-tested methods to create something new, It means double-checking, second-guessing and paranoia, too.

It means teaching a person how to do Science, And if you want good results, it means total Compliance.

- Farhan Mitha

Gut Thoughts You never realised how amazing you are, a walking talking miracle built from a hundred trillion cells, each cell outnumbered ten to one by a rowdy rabble of bacteria.

You never think about it until it all goes wrong: a riot of the wrong bacteria destroying the colonies of your inner world, taking you apart piece by piece; a game of Risk played in your gut.

And here come the scientists, saving our bodies, playing God, saying they might be able to fix you if they can just cut and insert this little something in the DNA; make this potato or that drink stimulate the growth of a starch.

And while they print their pretty ladders, try and make it work, you wonder if you really want this, imagine yourself in some dystopian world queuing up at the dispensary to get your fix, like that Soylent Green in a film you saw, keeping you in line, compliant.

- Julia Webb

Resistance Resistance means strength Resisting a thought means control Resisting an army means victory Resisting cancer means fighting Means opposing a force as defined by voltage and current complex minds But to me, Resistance means power, no darkness, blackout.

- Flavia Valeo and Josh Thody

Genomics I put three billion letters on a cloud And make it rain history Me and you and them are 99.9 % identical And this means everything to me Homo floresiensis may have survived until the dawn of the Neolithic But H. floresiensis never tasted toast And when it rains we know exactly what we did You say we did it to be human But we were alone after that When we stopped travelling we forgot we all started from the same place When it rains we look for breadcrumbs - Nicola Patron

Transformation It means to make bacteria take up new genes, It means freezing, then heat-shock, then bathing at a balmy 37°C. It means learning and growing; taking up new knowledge, It means a summer in the lab, bridging the gap between last year and next.

It means times are changing, new foundations being laid down, It means maybe we have the opportunity to help.

- Kieran Rustage

Starch It’s a source of energy Found in foods we love to eat People think we should not Eat carbs a whole lot Maybe if we can achieve our aim We can give starch a better name - Leda Coelweij

debranching is cutting off, is lopping limbs from a tree so it won’t fall over, is taking off the antlers of a stag, is the closure of numerous small rural stations.

It means cutting off, it means shutting down, it means shutting down small local banks to save money, it means choosing a new route home, it means altering the number of branches and branch lengths of a bacterial carbohydrate molecule.

It means cutting off, it is sawing off my own arm to stop the infection spreading, it’s treading the same well worn path over and over never branching out, it means cutting off, it means cutting something off.

- Julia Webb