Nicholas Haberd's Seed to Seed
The world-renowned botanical geneticist writes a natural history of plants: from cells to the cutlure of science
Seed to Seed by Nicholas Harberd shows that science can be thrilling, fun, even poetic, and that scientific vision can help a culture reconnect to the natural world.
Seed to Seed, The Secret Life of Plants by Nicholas Harberd combines a well-told scientific story with moving insights into the scientist's mind and the culture of science, and even into what science can do for a culture.
When Harberd, a world-renowned plant geneticists, finds himself a victim of researcher's block, he decides to document the natural history of a thale-cress plant. This common weed, "the fruit-fly of the plant world," is the focus of his research. But this thale-cress is not one of the thousands growing in his lab. This plant grows in a country churchyard close to his home in Norwich, England: out there, exposed to the vagaries of the weather, slugs, and rabbits.
Seed to Seed contains an account of the state of plant genetics and Harberd's struggle to find a project, and field notes on his graveside plant. Writing for non-scientists, Harberd presents the science with lucidity, often wowing the reader with the marvels of meristems, photosynthesis, root navigation, etc. Polly Napper's many exquisite sketches are very helpful.
But there's more. That individual, vulnerable plant is real to us like no "statistical" laboratory plant can ever be. It is described by a real person, "within the context of a wider representation of [Harberd's] mind". Harberd the man, who plays with his kids, bikes to work, reminisces about childhood, and is moved, often by the weather, to ponder life and death.
It is this unique and courageous angle that makes poetry out of science. Explaining how tealeaves pervade the water, Harberd writes of the "continuity of branch, stem, and leaf that connect me through the tea to the sun". And science is fun: "Hunting for mutants is such fun." Finding one is "as intense as splitting a featureless slab of shale and exposing a fossil".
This angle allows Harberd to give a picture of the practice and politics of science. But most moving is his take on the culture of science. Here Harberd has a message about vision: he wants science to make the invisible visible but in such a way that integrates it with common understanding. He wants "images that sing," that give "a familiar, at-home sort of feeling" about atoms, molecules, proteins. Perhaps that way we can "see ourselves as part of something sacred". Perhaps it is the only way to stop us from destroying the whole. Well, Nicholas Harberd sings of science.
