When I first began appropriating the plots of British-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch’s novels to explain scientific concepts, I never stopped to think about whether Murdoch herself would have approved of such an endeavour.
As a professor of molecular biophysics, I find that in both scientific research and all aspects of life, there can be great advantage in thinking differently. I’ve recently given some sessions on this at the Physics of Life summer school, and the fun, ideas and feedback were beyond my wildest dreams – especially as I’d been encouraged to conceal this side of myself as a young scientist.
Back in the 1990s, I did my PhD on protein folding – a conundrum underpinning all biology which has challenged scientists for decades. I wrote about it for The Conversation when a breakthrough won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2024.
At its heart is a question of competing energies: entropic forces, which motivate a protein and its surrounding medium to move as freely as possible, versus enthalpic, in which positive charges gravitate towards negative charges and things with oily properties congregate. Protein folding is driven by finding the best balance in a three-dimensional shape to satisfy as many of these forces as possible.
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An early book by the Booker-winning author A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom, examines the power structures and layers of control that drive Murdoch novels. It’s a comparable scenario to protein folding: the compromise between many clashing forces.
When Degrees of Freedom first came out in 1965, Murdoch had published nine novels. The book was reissued in 1994 with additional material, when only Murdoch’s final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma – written when Alzheimer’s disease was just beginning to invade her beautiful mind – had yet to emerge.
Reading Murdoch’s 1975 novel A Word Child in 2003, I was struck by the helix-shaped nature of the plot, with London Underground’s Circle Line platform pubs at Sloane Square and Liverpool Street acting as points of vulnerability. I immediately turned to Byatt’s book to see whether her analysis matched my own.
In finding there was no chapter on A Word Child, I trawled the internet and discovered the Iris Murdoch Society, which one could join for the princely sum of £5. Signing up at that time required emailing Anne Rowe at Kingston University, and I couldn’t resist explaining my thoughts on A Word Child and the molecular mechanisms underpinning Alzheimer’s disease. She invited me to submit an abstract to a conference – and from then on, I was hooked.
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So far, I’ve used ten out of Murdoch’s 26 novels to illustrate topics as broad as alcoholism and its effect on the liver, sex hormone signalling, evolution, molecular crowding and electron microscopy. While I’m not in any immediate danger of running out of Murdoch material, the recent publication of Poems from an Attic, a collection assembled from material found in her Oxford home many years after her death, adds a glorious new angle to my exploits.
While Murdoch is obsessed with nature – wild swimming, the changing seasons, flora, fauna and the meditative effects of being outdoors – she often speculates in her poems as to why things are as they are, which is an undeniably scientific way of thinking. There are examples of this in many of the poems, whatever their topic.
The word science occurs three times in the new volume – the first in the poem To B, who brought me two candles as a present (B was Murdoch’s lover, Brigid Brophy):
What you require of me no science gives –
To make these fires constant but not consumed.
What blazes every moment when it lives
Has eaten its own substance as it bloomed.
Yet though they burn not all the evening through,
While they are burning each to each is true.
This provides a satisfying analogy to justify sustaining Murdoch’s simultaneous passions. It invokes the same fuel-based resignation as American poet Edna St Vincent Millay’s First Fig:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!
The other two mentions of science in the new collection appear in You by Telephone – in which Murdoch muses over the changes, both positive and negative, that the invention of the phone had on the practicalities of relationships:
For I cannot close with kisses the lips that may speak me daggers,
Nor give you a gentle answer just by taking your hand.
The poem also includes this delightful digression:
In spite of the case of Odysseus, who might have got home much sooner
If at the start he could have dialled Ithaca one.
But he might have offended Hermes, that rival tele-communer,
And science would have precluded a lot of Homer’s fun.
I am relieved Murdoch didn’t have to grapple with smart phones, social media and today’s attention spans. Years ago, I scoured her archive for thoughts on science, which were mostly touched upon in correspondence, and her entertaining annotations of The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays by Martin Heidegger, and The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.
Murdoch was certainly interested in science, albeit with a healthy dose of scepticism, while being alarmed at its pace of development. I like to fantasise that I could have talked her down.
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