Lately, I’ve been longing for the theatre. I was involved in it a lot growing up, and I miss it. I miss the regular rehearsals, the creative new line readings, the way I’d wait in the wings to make sure I went onstage at the perfect time. It was like my brain was a radio, and acting was turning the dial to a different frequency than usual. It let me hone skills such as teamwork: even if I was the only person in a scene at that moment, there was an entire spiderweb of people involved in the production. It let me be creative in a new way. I would always leave an acting class (whether in school or extracurricular) happier. I haven’t acted since I was sixteen years old, and I’ve longed to do more of it since then.
This longing might belie my background in science: a bachelor’s in biology (though with a minor in English), an almost-finished M.Sc. from Trinity, the intention to start working in the field upon graduation. I’ve had a love for science from my early childhood–but that love has been coupled with a parallel love for the arts. On top of acting, I also dabbled in other creative pursuits. I was in the choir in high school, college and at Trinity. I attended a creative writing extracurricular from ages 13 to 18. I was also on the math competition team, took honors biology classes and eagerly volunteered at my high school’s STEM fair in my final year.
Generally, there’s a perception that arts and sciences are inherently different. It is often thought that there can be no overlap, that the skills useful in, for example, a comparative literature degree are not transferable to a biology one. To some extent, this is true–English professors usually don’t run PCR tests as part of their daily workload and biologists don’t tend to discuss literary symbolism with their colleagues. But there are other skills gained from these courses of study that are useful, necessary and transferable.
My English classes helped me improve my writing abilities even more, and I used those to write a grant proposal to join an ecology lab. The same classes taught me how to make a convincing argument with evidence, or to state a conclusion arising from the information you have–what is a scientific paper if not an application of this skill? Finally, they also taught me how to read critically. They taught me to take a deep look at the claims being made, and see if they match what is “between the lines.” All of these abilities are ones I acquired as a result of interdisciplinarity. All of these abilities are essential.
To those who know me, what I’m going to do next is very predictable: I’m going to quote Shakespeare. Early on in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helena describes her relationship with her best friend Hermia: “So we grew together / Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, / But yet in union in partition, / Two lovely berries molded on one stem; / So with two seeming bodies but one heart.” We can’t separate the arts and the sciences. We shouldn’t. The same way there is good art, there is also good science (the reverse also applies). They are “two lovely berries molded on one stem” and are “in union in partition.” Both of them have the same “heart”: a desire to understand the world we live in, and a desire to explain it.
Both the arts and science have always been inspired by the society around them. They have also inspired each other. Both disciplines have a myth of greatness being the result of a solitary figure. Perhaps we imagine a scientific breakthrough happening in a lab after hours, as a lonely, misunderstood genius holds up a test tube and yells some variation of “Eureka!” Perhaps we visualize a world-changing novel being written at night in a dusty attic by an author hunched over a typewriter, scribbled pages scattered all around. But this is highly unusual. It’s more like a game of poker: I see your discussions of vitalism, and I raise you Frankenstein.
It has been such a privilege to be able to be involved with both of these disciplines. Each has given me skills I use regularly and experiences I will never forget. They have also given me a realization of how insular these fields can be, and how much antagonism can exist between them. In my involvement with creative fields, I’ve seen people think scientists ruin the beauty and the wonder of the world, and are condescending and uncreative. On the other hand, I’ve seen scientists deride those in the arts field for perhaps choosing to take “physics for poets” classes to meet a course requirement instead of slaving over quantum mechanics for the sheer love of it. We have to stop this. Someone who can run a flawless ELISA assay is not automatically better than someone who can scan a Shakespeare monologue perfectly. Someone who can paint breathtaking masterpieces is not inherently superior to someone who’s writing code for Google.
Many issues in society, it is argued, could be mitigated if people just got to see the other side or hear other perspectives. While the efficacy of such an approach may be in doubt, maybe this is the solution for this problem as well. Many universities have a School of Arts and Sciences. This is the way to go. We cannot separate chemists and composers, physicists and poets. My undergraduate institution required everyone to take social sciences and humanities courses, as well as STEM ones, to graduate, and I’m very grateful for this. For one of my social sciences classes, I chose an anthropology class which aligned closely with my research interests. It ended up being one of the most influential courses I’ve ever taken–I still think about the topics we studied regularly, and that was in the autumn 2021 semester–but I also wish I’d been able to take even more classes outside of my areas of study. I wish I’d taken the seminar about witches, the African history lecture, and the introductory Old English class. Physics for poets classes are vital, but we also need poetry for physicists.
Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, describes a society where people can have screens the size of walls broadcasting all day, use devices that fit into their ears and stream music directly, and wage a war with weapons that could cause unbelievable destruction. As a result of these technologies, the protagonist’s wife is disconnected from him, dependent on watching her shows all day. She cannot sleep without her “seashells” piping music into her ears. The novel is from 1953, yet it could be set right now. The advances in science that Bradbury described have happened. So have some of the consequences. Being able to analyze those consequences, along with how they occurred, is essential. And what’s even more amazing is the fact that we can do that with fiction! Often, it is said that history must be learned from in order to prevent it repeating. The events we should learn from, often tragedies, are ones that happened to real people and had very real, tangible consequences that continue to affect our world. But being able to pick up a book about fictional people in a fictional world, and realize what mistakes we might be making is such an advantage. If we didn’t treat STEM and the arts as being entirely different, maybe–I know this may sound too hopeful–-we’d have realized how harmful technology dependance can be earlier by reading Bradbury’s novel.
To end, I’ll refer back to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Very soon after the lines I quoted above–in fact, in the same monologue–Helena asks Hermia, “And will you rent our ancient love asunder / To join with men in scorning your poor friend?” There is an “ancient love” between science and the arts. Creativity is at the heart of much notable science (a clever experimental technique, a new application for an existing technology), and many notable works of art deal with scientific debates. Science and the arts build on each other, and themselves, intertwined like the complex plotlines in a novel, or like mycorrhizae and roots in the soil. Neither is done in a vacuum–so why do we relegate them to one?
