Research - Exciting, Informative, Inspirational -- Clare Weiner
(This blog is the text of a talk I was meant to give at the September 'Hawkesbury LitFest Afternoon Talks' this autumn - prevented by 'unforeseen circumstances' - adult children, even slightly over 40, should consult parents when they are wedding planning!)
Reading Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel – Best of Friends – reminds me of my first inspiration to write fiction based firmly on the necessary research. And to be bold about it. Since then, and knowing some reader’s reactions – though not all – I have seen the sense of moderating for a wider audience. Although I still admire Shamsie, trained as a journalist and the daughter of a journalist mother, for her boldness in writing life as it is without giving offence but certainly with a moral boldness and realism.
A second influence on my writing has been the research I began to do. I had originally imagined a sci-fi tale based around the recent news (back then in 1996–7) about Dolly the sheep, the first successfully cloned farm animal. As I talked with a friend who works in genetics and cell science, she led me to The Second Creation, the story behind the work which led eventually to the conception and birth of Dolly, written by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and Colin Tudge and colleagues at Roslin Research.* But there was so much more, including the entire story of the development of cell science and the very first investigations into reproducing live creatures in other ways than by ‘sexual reproduction’. The moral questions presented by this can be solved by a simple ‘we don’t go there’ and possibly had been for centuries. But once the science has been revealed, even a little bit, they become complex and life-changing — in more than one sense. My original idea, enormously changed, appears in the first of the Mullins Family Saga, originally titled Baby, Baby, and hopefully to be rebranded and published next year under the title of Never Mind the Family - feel the love...
So here is a sketchy outline of the research process. Through reading The Second Creation, (Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell, writing with Colin Tudge), I entered the world of cell biology, something we had only touched on at school in the mid 1960s. And through discovering a previously published book, The Second Genesis :the Coming Control of Life,** discovered the extensive earlier scientific research which underlay this and opened up possibilities in areas beyond ‘simply cloning sheep’. I learnt about the early experiments on frog’s eggs, details on how progress was made towards the process of what was known as ‘test tube babies’ (a very inaccurate term indeed!), and enormous amounts about what was done using the cells of the African Clawed Toad, Xenopus laevis, by Dr Gurdon and his team in Oxford. This research would have been going on during the 1960s, building on beginnings in the 19th century.
I discovered and bought this book at Hay on Wye in July 2001. It is absolutely fascinating, and as a bit of an aside, the author also explores and considers the future of love, the family, and reproduction, moving and speculating on a future we now appear to be living within. It offers the reader the information on just how complex our cells are, and at the same time where this knowledge can take researchers, and if we chose, our society. And, although it was all too much to put into a novel aimed at general readers, it informed me as a writer, and opened up my interest in the possibilities of story around such research, so that a simplified and comprehensive version served to tell an intriguing tale, and introduce us, via the Guthrie and Mullins families, to a collection of lively, eccentric, and variously committed people.
Back then, once I’d made the swap from an imaginary world, a sci-fi fantasy futuristic novel. I began researching the facts around cloning and ‘artificial reproduction’ My Bodleian library and Radcliffe Science library cards were still valid from taking a certificate in Social and Political science at the Oxford Department of Continuing Education, in the mid-1990s. So I had the privilege of using these excellent libraries. It was, of course, the days before Google searching, but the learned journals were becoming available via Medline, and not yet behind a paywall, as well as on the shelves.
Having friends who worked in related areas of biological science and zoology also helped enormously. Via the zoologist father of one of my children’s friends, I had introductions to several scientists who worked at the ‘coalface’ of micromanipulation, (moving the content of tiny cells around, using a hollow needle), to see and have explained their equipment, from micromanipulator with tiny needles you made as you required them, to the electron microscope. Via my friends in pharmacology, I visited their lab to view computerised equipment and understand much more about the working environment, and the ups and downs, of research science. And through the zoology connection I received an invitation to visit the local hospital’s fertility clinic, talk to the staff, and actually view human embryos, prepared and ready to implant in their mothers’ womb. All this was beyond belief of what I had expected.
I shall always value those introductions and the visits. And, still in touch with our pharmacology friends, I have been able to check or have checked various facts around, for example, the daily life of the research scientist, from receiving samples, buying in medium, cells, and equipment, biosecurity, the nail-biting work that goes into applying for funding, and the pressures on mothers in science.
It is a fascinating world. I am truly grateful to all who helped me and guided me, and have immensely enjoyed creating two novels about how life panned out when Jenny Guthrie, daughter of a celebrity fertility expert, met Max Mullins, oldest son of a Fundamentalist Pastor! The final book, Farewell, Fifteen, available now,***describes, from their daughter Alice’s viewpoint, what it can be like to be the children of two busy, professional parents, who fail to see you as the person you are, and the struggle to become not a clone but a person who has seen into the value of the arts in our increasingly technology-run world.
* The Second Creation, the age of biological control – Ian Wilmot, Keith Campbell and Colin Tudge (Headline, 2000)
** The Second Genesis, the coming control of life – Albert Rosenfeld, (Prentice Hall,1969)
*** Farewell, Fifteen (Hodge Publishing, September 2023) available from my website (https://www.marihowardauthorandpainter.co.uk/)
or order from a bookshop, and soon to be on Amazon KDP
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