The Two Cultures: Did we make a mistake?

14 October 2022

Ali Gibson was a member of A New Direction’s Young Challenge Group from 2021-22. Here, they offer their opinion on what changes can be made to benefit the creative lives of young people.

At school, I was a scientist. I did well in Biology, Chemistry and Physics, was identified as a talented mathematician and fortunate enough to be supported by a teacher who went over and above to nurture my ability in maths, and spent most of my childhood with the expectation I would be on my way to university to study some scientific discipline. Whilst they weren’t wrong, as I now find myself in third year of medical school at King’s College London, on my journey to get here I was discouraged from opportunities that were seen to throw my chances into jeopardy; opportunities which were largely related to the arts. A keen actor in primary school and after-school theatre productions, I lost my ability to engage with these as my science-based academic commitments grew. I was actively discouraged from picking an arts subject at GCSE, and spent the period unjustifiably jealous at other students lugging around A2-sized portfolio sketchbooks in plastic folders.

Since starting university, my path on the medical degree has been very similar. I spend my days waist-deep in 300 slides-worth of lectures, rote-learning the names of enzymes involved in the Krebs’ Cycle (the biological process that provides energy to our cells), and the collections of symptoms that differentiate asthma from cancer. But I’ve also found myself wandering into more creative outlets too: I took an additional module in first year that looked at different approaches and perspectives on art, science and mental health, producing a portfolio of art pieces intended to stimulate discussion in schools. I contributed to an opening piece in Science Gallery London’s GENDERS season, designed and delivered a workshop on breaking gender stereotypes for International Women’s Day 2020, and wrote another blog piece on the post-COVID Creative Revolution I believed (and still hope) was only round the corner. After the transition to lockdowns and staying at home, I joined local arts group Youth Platform, part of Peckham Platform’s Digital Tapestries project, to creatively record our emotions through this moment in time. I found this one of the most freeing and expressive places to be and exist; a place which helped me find something in myself and rediscover a love of being creative for myself.

I’ve found other ways of bringing creativity into my medical degree. We have a student-selected component where we choose a project that is of interest or perhaps is the future area we want to work in. I selected a project about retelling patient narratives, through which I sat down with four patient educators (members of the public who live with health conditions or have experience of healthcare) for two hours to hear about their lives, in and outside of their medical conditions. When asked to retell the stories I’d heard, in a moment of creative inspiration fuelled by the extracurricular creative opportunities, I decided to write spoken word poems about those experiences and life stories. These pieces and reflections – about the value of story in medicine, and the benefits creative expression can have on developing future medics – led me to be shortlisted for and jointly awarded the medical school’s prize for outstanding achievement in this module.

Looking back now on those experiences I had in school, I do wonder – are we right to distinguish ‘The Two Cultures’? This phrase was coined by scientist and writer CP Snow in his influential Rede Lecture series, delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1959: he spoke of his dual life in the academic communities of physicists and writers as inhabiting different “intellectual, moral or psychological climate[s]”, and the sad consequences which arrive from these two worlds never meeting. Fifty years on from his lecture and I was in school, labels of ‘scientist’ and ‘doctor’ placed on me that steered my course away from creative subjects: the Two Cultures very much ingrained in our educational model. We know now that the world that we teach our children is unlikely to be the world they will grow into. Technology and scientific development moves too fast, new ideas arrive at such a pace that in mere years there will jobs and new areas of thought that don’t exist even at the fringes of what we can imagine now. Yet we continue to funnel ‘scientific reasoning’ and ‘artistic creativity’ as two separate strands of ability. The students of today are done wrong by us continuing to pretend we live in a world as reductionist as the principles of science can seem, or that art is uninhibited by the world and exists outside of our natural or physical context.

I hope that education in the future will craft glue or staple gun this widening chasm closed and build bridges and highways between the two; that the Venn diagram of these two schools of thought will soon be recognised as one beautiful circle. Some work is heading in that direction, with STEM morphing into STEAM education and government promises going towards both science and arts education, but education mostly seems to operate in the realm of those two camps, and often in order to benefit the development of pupils’ scientific skills and knowledge.

After all, the thinkers in our history who revolutionised our world were polymaths, dabblers in many trades, subjects and pursuits that no doubt enriched one another. I’m now stepping out of medicine for two years to complete an MA in Art and Science at University of the Arts, London, where I hope to be spending my time teaching those with lived experience of healthcare to write of their experiences and explore collectively what it can be like to live with and live through various conditions, states of health and treatment. My aim is for this to forge a new form of the medical humanities, an area of creativity that explores the humanity of receiving care, of health and illness, disease, death and loss, the emotions that surround those times and the lives of those affected. And this has only come about because I, as well as the opportunities that I got to take part in, dared to strike a crack in the walls between these two institutions and play around in what was formed in between.