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TEXBOT 6: Plant Culture

Every one of us knows the feeling of revelation when scientific insights illuminate our understanding of the world. Equally, when art leads us to see a scientific topic in a different way, there is a feeling of respect, and an awareness of the limitations of the rational explanation. These insights often occur at the interface between the personal and the external worlds: between what one thinks and what everyone else says one should think. These Thirteen Seasonal Pieces are about this inspirational area of interpretation, and the realization that it is there that scientists can work to enrich their disciplines.

Why is this important? This series of Plant Culture articles was partly developed around the hypothesis that what attracts people to a topic is a belief that it is not just enlightening, but also contemporary and relevant to their lives and to society. Further, that the restricted view of science as the domain of pure analysis is fundamentally off-putting for students embarking on a career and deciding whether to focus on science, or the arts and humanities. The articles ask whether science has to be so restricted: or could scientists, by developing the depth and interpretation of their subject, broaden its remit and give it the same appeal - to the human in us - as the arts and humanities?

Plant Culture thus envisages a world in which exploitation of research findings from plant science is intellectual, cultural and social, as well as economic. To achieve this, scientists would need to give more time to re-building what has been analysed, to putting back together what has been pulled apart, against the background of what was there before. The scientific enterprise would spend more energy exploring the wider relevance of scientific findings so that science culture no longer forges a separate, parallel path to the wider social culture. Because, unless we cultivate our knowledge as well as exploit it for profit, non-scientists will remain alienated from the community of science and may increasingly reject its advances.

In other words, scientists must think and write more about the meaning of what they do. The next Plant Culture series, scheduled for 2005 and titled Plant World, will endeavour to further this process by exploring the roles of plants in different cultures around the world. The impact of advances in plant science on these roles will be particularly emphasized. Readers interested in contributing to these papers should contact me as soon as possible.

Finally, it is really inaccurate to portray these Thirteen Seasonal Pieces as motivated by a straightforward agenda concerning science communication. They are primarily a collection of beautiful things, in praise of a remarkable world that slips all the time through an individual’s fingers. Only through culture can we conserve it.

Nick Battey (e-mail)
University of Reading
22 March 2004