It’s National Poetry Month.
I’m hard at work drafting and revising a new book about the molecules inside our cells and what they look like.
I haven’t blogged in eons.
Add those three things up, and you have this quirky post!
You see, I found an irresistable little ditty in a biography I read while researching the new book. In the poem, mathematician Lindo Patterson celebrates William Astbury’s 1935 discovery that the physical properties of a protein are dictated not only by its component molecules but also by the ways those molecules are assembled in three dimensions. This was a huge leap of thinking for the time, and the basis of decades of subsequent research into the structure of biological molecules.
I’ll share details later, when the book is done. For now, just enjoy the poem:
Amino acids in chains,
are the cause, or so the X-ray explains,
of the stretching of wool,
and its strength when you pull,
and show why it shrinks when it rains.
by Lindo Patterson
I found the poem in Kersten Hall’s THE MAN IN THE MONKEYNUT COAT: WILLIAM ASTBURY AND THE FORGOTTEN ROAD TO THE DOUBLE HELIX, but it originally appeared in a printed version of one of Astbury’s lectures to the Faraday Society: Astbury, W.T. (1938) Transactions of the Faraday Society, 34, pp 378-388.
