Jay Clayton, Literature, Science, and Public Policy: From Darwin to Genomics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023) 290 pp. £85.00 Hb. Open Access via Cambridge Core. ISBN: 9781009263528
Jay Clayton’s valuable book takes a range of texts that may seem familiar to BSLS readers and remakes them as the foundations for a new set of approaches to literary study and scientific policy. Literature, Science, and Public Policy seeks to develop the debates we have amongst ourselves as students of this type of work, and to take those discussions out into the world. Throughout Clayton ‘argues for the value of humanities perspectives in science policy’ (xiv) and asserts that:
the methods I demonstrate through close readings of genetics novels would be equally useful in thinking about policy in a wide range of areas, including artificial intelligence, neuroscience, nanotechnology, network theory, media, technology studies, climate science, animal rights, urban studies, poverty, homelessness, race, sexuality, and more (xiv).
This is a deeply generous and thoughtful book, and Clayton’s claims about policy here are both provocative and straightforward. Part of the book is based on highly successful collaborations, including three separate National Institutes of Health grants (Clayton is the first English Literature scholar to receive direct funding from the NIH). So, whilst the claims are forthright, they have a solid foundation and are articulated with confidence rather than aspiration. This is one of the key values of this book for those of us particularly based in Humanities (and English Studies) in the UK, and to a certain extent Europe – that the study of writing, and culture, is de facto something that might support and direct policy, government thinking, and public understanding. This commitment to the educative, intellectual and governmental importance of humanities thinking is foundational throughout Clayton’s book, and it is something that needs to be repeated, particularly at this moment in time. It is also something that needs to be thought of confidently, rather than defensively, and it is timely and pleasing to be reminded of this, despite or maybe because of the rather shell-shocked and browbeaten nature of humanities in the UK-based Higher Education sector at the moment (my apologies for the UK-focus of this, but similar challenges to Humanities are being felt around the world).
This is a long account of the book’s purpose but the whole text is threaded with this commitment to the importance of writing and thinking about writing and, indeed, writing about writing. Clayton argues for the ‘value of humanities perspectives in science policy […] outlines concrete steps for humanists who would like to prepare themselves for careers in this area’ (xiv).
Clayton divides the book itself into four sections: Literature and Science; Deep Time; The Modern Synthesis; Genome Time. He reads work by authors as diverse as Ian McEwan, H.G. Wells, A.S. Byatt, Samuel R. Delaney, Octavia Butler, and Kazuo Ishiguro. The division of the book allows for a collecting together of ideas and concerns. Clayton considers the ‘reciprocal exchange between literature and the life sciences’ (xiv) by focussing on three key periods: the response to Darwin; the 1930s and Cold War period; and the ‘age of genome time’ (xiv), that is, the twenty-first century. These ‘moments’ are ‘exemplary’ (xiv) and allow Clayton to consider a broad chronological development.
‘Literature and Science Policy’ uses McEwan’s Saturday to think about the development of scientific policy and in particular the ways in which ethics interact with understanding and process. This keynote section presents a clear outline of ‘pedagogical research methods for using literature and film to explore the ethical and social issues raised by genetics’ (11). For Clayton, this work has clear potential to have ‘impacts on science policy’ (12), and he cites the impressive examples of Priscilla Wald, Lennard Davis, Wai Chee Dimock and many others. This overview shows the increasing tessellation of work on culture and genetics. Approaching Saturday, a text whose ‘pedagogic value stems from the dialogue it stages between literature and science’ (18), Clayton argues that the book provides moments of ‘common ground for the two cultures’ (18). The discussion of the text leads to a consideration on temporality, genetic determinism, and, as suggested earlier, science policy. Clayton’s central point is that those trained in literary and historical analysis have a serious and substantive role to play in understanding how science is governed and legislated for. For this to work, he suggests, ‘we need to show that humanistic perspectives […] can be of value to policy debates’ (30).
The shift back to Victorian writing in the ‘Deep Time’ section (and then the chronological movement to the present day) gives the book a pleasing historical sweep. Discussions of Wells, later Victorian fiction and Neo-Victorian writings splice analysis of the working of the texts with consideration for how this enables new ways of thinking about policy and science’s situation in culture. There are excellent discussions of novels, considerations of poetics, meditations on posthumanism, biodystopia, cloning and evolution. Clayton’s understanding of each text is precise, but he knits them into an expanding narrative that calmly asserts social and cultural engagement with science and its implications over a couple of centuries. Interspersing the relatively sci-lit canonical (McEwan, Huxley, Ishiguro) with delighted readings of John Varley, Octavia Butler, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Andrea Barrett, Clayton traces a vortex of associative and thoughtful engagements with crucial ideas of ethics, eugenics and humanness. Not only is close analysis and literary reading useful and potentially policy-leading; it is also fun!
Throughout his movement chronologically to-and-fro Clayton reminds us of the many ethical, scientific and legal debates that have been undertaken without the input of humanists, and, further, of how literature and culture direct our understanding and imagining of scientific potential and action. In some ways the shifting between genres, historical moment and policy context highlights the ways that we might think in this new context – or, emphasises again a kind of breadth of knowledge and understanding, and a comfort with complexity that characterises humanities thinking. The section on posthumanism, for instance, understands science fiction writings as being ‘better suited to this kind of thought experiment than most of the nonfiction about posthumanism that aims to influence public policy’ (135). What shines throughout the entire book is a positivity and tempered-idealism, a firm belief in the importance of writing and ideas. There is wisdom here, and clarity of thinking.
In some ways Clayton’s work is of a piece with other publications thinking seriously about the role of the humanities academic. His thinking chimes well with me as I have spent a long time working with the subdiscipline of ‘public history’, which, amongst other things, has long sought to establish historical expertise and practice in policy contexts (see also for instance the work of the History and Policy Group). Clayton’s thinking it seems to me links with this kind of work exactly because he sees the practice of literary analysis as well-suited to help us understand the world. Rather than be apologetic, he argues that close reading and other skills should and could be central to our wider investigations of the world and ourselves. Humanities scholars should not be the ‘add-on’ or simply ‘creative’ aspect of scientific projects, brought along to provide light relief or open up access to popular audiences somehow (or, as I have found repeatedly, asked to talk specifically about ‘narrative’ and ‘storytelling’ in relation to experimentation). Instead, they should be at the heart of policy design and ethical process, and ‘the failure to include these perspectives [is] diminishing the quality of debate in the policy world’ (xi-xii). The very practical nature of this book, the way that it shows how to do this and how it is being done in projects that ‘have begun to shift the boundaries of humanities research’ (12), make it a crucial text for us all.
Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester
