Science can be incredibly fascinating or terribly cold. We have noticed that. It is no coincidence that Frankenstein, the novel written by the very young Mary Shelley, is still today a source of inspiration for countless books and films. A story that is, in the end, quite simple, yet for two centuries it has continued to raise uneasy and deeply relevant questions: what is the boundary between science and horror? Where will scientific progress lead us?
Certainly, the news of recent times does little to improve our collective imagination. One need only think, just to name a few examples, of drones used for warfare and artificial intelligences whose ethical limits remain uncertain…
But science does not have to be this.
Science is made monstrous.
Science becomes monstrous when it loses its poetry.
Poetry and science—therefore the poetic dimension of things and the scientific one—may actually be quite similar. Like our hands, the left and the right: opposite, yet belonging to the same human being. Different hands, yet both necessary to knead reality.
Similar, because they share something that shines: the ability to imagine the world differently from how it is.
Science, for instance, can stand before something raw, terrible, unacceptable—and transform it into the future.
Art transforms it into wonder.
Speaking of turning reality into wonder, a film comes to mind: Hamnet, born from the moving gaze of director Chloé Zhao. A film that makes you believe it wants to tell a certain story (I won’t spoil it!), only for you to realize that it is actually about us—about all of us, about human beings, of today and yesterday and always. Through human sensitivity and creativity, art manages to overturn pain and make the impossible possible. And everything resonates within us, tinted with beauty.
The truth is that poetry does not need to be explained… poetry belongs to everyone.
And that is another reason why poetry and science are similar. Poetry belongs to everyone, yes… but science belongs to everyone too—or at least it should. And when that happens, science becomes a true work of art. It becomes poetic when it keeps its promise:
not to move against the other, but toward the other,
in a leap of imagination.
Speaking of something that belongs to everyone, I recall a rather unusual story. A story about a war that, instead of claiming victims, sought to give the future as a gift.
During the years of the Cold War, more precisely in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an intense battle that deployed neither tanks nor ballistic missiles. Instead, it was fought with test tubes. Two knights in white coats challenged each other to a duel from laboratories on opposite sides of the world: one in America and one in the USSR. The duelists were rivals, yes, but they shared a very clear conviction: they could not accept that children should fall ill and lose their lives.
In those years there were recurring epidemics of a virus that had become a true condemnation for humanity. At the time, there was only one way to defend oneself: to hope to escape it.
Those two men, named Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, competed to find the best solution. They worked passionately and managed to create two truly revolutionary weapons: two vaccines, very different from each other, to stop this unacceptable disease.
Who won the battle for the better vaccine?
Well, that is where something wonderful appears.
They both won. And everyone won.
In fact, neither vaccine was perfect: one was more complicated but safer; the other was easier to administer and more effective, yes… but also riskier. Yet the beauty of it was that one complemented the other: where one could not reach, the other could. One, with its characteristics, could save part of the world; the other, with its differences, the rest.
Moreover, to speed everything up, citizens around the world took part in the battle, donating and donating their money to fund the research. The famous “March of Dimes” became known everywhere, a fundraising campaign so called because everyone contributed whatever they could.
But it was not only the dream of defeating that disease that united the two scientists. Another decision bound them together and secured their place in history: both chose not to patent the vaccine. This decision allowed production to begin as quickly as possible, at the cost of giving up enormous profits. It was their gift to all the children of the world.
The World Health Organization says that today polio has almost disappeared from the face of the earth. Some strains have been completely eradicated: they no longer exist. From a terrifying fate to a page of history—a story belonging to the past.
This is exactly how science becomes something wonderful… and when you think about it, all it takes is a single, simple ingredient: that science does not lose its poetry. Then the two become similar again.
And that is when they become two hands that create,
hands that grasp the world as it is
and push it beyond reality.
Returning it more beautiful,
more free,
healthier,
to those who will come after us.
Making space
for new research,
for new cures…
And arriving,
together,
beyond what we once thought possible to imagine.
Adriana Ferretti
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