Science as Enchantment with Dr. Rob Gilbert (Part 3 of Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age)

In this presentation, Prof. Robert Gilbert, Professor of Biophysics in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford, explain how science, for the scientist, is a source of enchantment.

Prof. Gilbert and his team work on molecular mechanisms underlying pathology in humans, specifically cancer and membrane pore formation and cell adhesion. Their work is funded by Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust.

In this presentation, he talks about: 

1. Scientific discoveries that have drastically changed the world
2. Unpacking the mechanistic lens of science
3. How delight and play are crucial for scientists
4. The beauty of the form and fit of science
5. On aesthetic delight in science
6. How enchantment is essential to the scientific process

To learn more about Robert, you can find him at:

Website: https://www.strubi.ox.ac.uk/research/professor-robert-gilbert
Email: gilbert@strubi.ox.ac.uk

This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/)
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)

Transcript

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work — the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

Hey, everyone. This is the third episode from our International Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age, held at McGill University in Montreal in November 2024. Our speaker is Professor Rob Gilbert, who is Professor of Biophysics at Oxford University. His work focuses on molecular mechanisms underlying pathology in humans, specifically cancer and membrane pore formation and cell adhesion. Professor Gilbert is also an Anglican priest. Let's get started.

Rob: So thank you to Brandon very much for inviting me. It's lovely to be here. It's an honor to be here. As I'm a biologist, I'm going to talk a little bit about ways in which I believe enchantment has an important role in science. I think it's important just to ground the lead I'm taking from Cosmic Connections. So as you remember, in Cosmic Connections, there's a clear and focused definition of enchantment, disenchantment around — we're going to talk about disenchantment around demagification, for example, and the impact that has on thinking about or how it might relate to thinking about a mechanistic understanding of the world, the way the world operates, which is how a lot of science or all science essentially is carried on. And so a key starting point for me is that clear definition. So as Charles Taylor says, in focusing on what we mean by disenchantment for the purposes of Cosmic Connections and for the argument that follows, he says, "The post-Galilean science of nature sidelines form in this sense—the sense of seeing some kind of purpose, shape, enchantment in things—sidelines this as irrelevant and looks for regularities for efficient causal relations in the world of matter." That is, of course, how science operates. It's looking for regularities. In fact, that's a great word. Regularities: that is what scientists are constantly looking for. That's what experiments are designed to try and show us. A second quotation here, which is relevant, is later Charles Taylor says, "The felt link to an external object must be the result of its causal action on my senses or receptors. There is no place for any other kind of relation involving a more intimate connection." That's the thing I'm going to talk about and contest, I guess. But actually, there is a more intimate connection going on when scientists do the work that they do. I am going to try and say that there is a more intimate connection. And of course, there's going to be some very interesting opportunities for discussion. Indeed, I would perhaps want to say moments of epiphany the scientist has in perceiving what they perceive.

Now, in terms of enchantment in science, I think there are various words I might use as synonyms there. I think the scientist is perceiving or recognizing purpose sometimes is one of the other words you could use for enchantment of scientist sees or the sort of enchanted way of viewing things that they make use of. Purpose, meaning, form, voice actually. So it's as if the world is speaking to you. And as my abstract says, a friend of mine has pointed out that, actually, what helped me to see that when we see things as beautiful, they are speaking to us. And so there's a sense in which there's a voice the scientist perceives. It invites playful responses. I'm going to say a little bit about play in science and playful engagement. And it is a beauty as I say that addresses us, I think, when the scientist sees what you could call enchanting aspects of the world or, more importantly, where the enchantment the scientist feels they find to be a route to understanding the way things actually are, which is a very surprising thing. But I want to suggest it really is how things are.

Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk through some of the examples now and make a set of key points that were also in my abstract that was circulated. So the first thing is to recognize the sense in which molecular biology is an example of a very powerful mechanistic paradigm for understanding the way the world is, and the way in which molecular biology has been extraordinarily impactful in doing this. And so every year, there's a kind of annual jamboree of the Nobel Prizes. It is not uncommon at all for molecular biology to be strongly recognized in that as it was this year in the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, which went to the people using artificial intelligence approaches to understand protein folding, among other things. For example, molecular biology is very powerful. David Baker's Nobel Prize is part of that group of people. His was for being able to mechanically design proteins because of what we understood about how proteins have been adapted, how they have evolved. So we have a very strong mechanistic paradigm that we see played out in molecular biology.

On my handout, I just wanted to point to an example I give in my abstract, is a series of crystal structures which were epochal in the middle of the 20th century. Myoglobin, hemoglobin, Perutz and Kendrew, Doroty Hodgkin's structure in vitamin B12. But the structure of chymotrypsin was the first enzyme. That at 1A is a picture of the electron density map. And as perhaps some of you will know, originally, electron density maps had to be drawn on perspex sheets and then stacked up. You would then get a sense of the shape of the molecule inside. This is from x-ray diffraction. It's possible then having done that to then build an atomic model. You can see this tracing of the atomic model there from that vintage image there of chymotrypsin's electron density with the atoms and the bonds between them drawn on. So you can see there's a very simple depiction of a chemical basis for understanding the working of this enzyme. The key thing I think just to take home from this is that, really, the paradigm has not shifted from the 1950s onwards in some fundamental sense. It's just got more and more complicated, okay? So there's a more and more sophisticated way in which exactly this way of understanding things is playing out.

So at 1B, you've got a series of images. The thing in the background, the sort of gray scale, is actually an image of a mitochondrion, which is the energy-generating organelles inside every nucleic cell, every nucleated cell. The image below is the 3D-rendered thing with the yellow tubes. That's actually a 3D representation. It's not a representation just. It's actually a 3D structure of the electron density from inside that mitochondrion. The yellow things are ATP synthases which are generating ATP. ATP, adenosine triphosphate, is the universal energy currency in the cell. The large thing in the middle at the top right is a close-up of a dimer. So two of these ATP synthases come together, and they shape the membranes. You don't need to know any of this. All you need to take from it is this key point that what we're doing is simply iterating from this basic insight that you can represent molecules atomistically and then, from that, get a kind of mechanistic understanding of how they operate. And it's just getting more and more complicated as we use electron microscopy in more and more sophisticated ways, shorter time scales, fancy x-ray diffraction techniques and so on. So we get now these depictions we can draw, which can now give us structures of unique cells. Actually, we can get a structure of the inside of a cell where all its different protein complexes are. And as I say, this is just one example. See inside, the energy-generating mitochondrion of the cell and see how that is structured. Bottom left at 1C, this is another complex from inside the mitochondrion is the thing. It's a complex of complexes. Four different complexes come together, which actually are the generators of a proton gradient, a pH gradient, across the inner mitochondrial membrane that helps the ATP synthases to generate ATP. I'm not going to carry on in this mode, but I just want to get the point across about how sophisticated the mechanical approach is. Right? That's the key thing I want to get across. So it's become very, very powerful.

Now, obviously, this approach is not just interesting. Biochemists do what they do because they are delighted. They are excited by what they study. It is not just interesting. It's also useful, right? That's the next thing to say. So 2, the key thing here is, obviously, what we're talking about here is a four-dimensional chemistry. So I emphasized that with 1A, we can see the chemistry of the chymotrypsin. We're doing it in four dimensions now. We're doing it for complex proteins, and we're doing it in four dimensions. We see them play out in time. Now, the fruitfulness of this, the power of this is seen in the ways in which that then helps us to get new insights that help us change the world. I haven't shown this example here, but a key example I often reach for are key forms of drug discovery, drug design, based on structural insights. You design a drug. You feed it to people. It stops them dying. So there is nothing kind of subjective about that, right? If you were fed Gleevec or imatinib—it's a drug widely used against forms of leukemia—if you're fed that and it stops you dying, that's a very real change that's been brought about for you because of the insights the scientists have. So we're dealing with something quite pretty realist here, our insights. They're not just points of view, okay? These mechanical insights seem to be very powerful.

2A is actually an image. I thought this would be of more contemporary relevance, perhaps, and also because of the depiction of 2C of it in a kind of using an artistic reference point. But at 2A, that's actually the blue and red thing. It's actually the kind of action part of an antibody from a convalescent patient suffering from COVID-19. The purple bit is actually the protein on COVID-19 that binds to our cells. And so this is looking at our human antibody bound to the virus. That helps you understand how human antibodies might stop the virus working. 2B is to just make this point that it's three or four-dimensional chemistry. So that inside looks kind of shapely the purple thing and the red and the blue thing joined together. But if you're looking close, it isn't just obviously a picture at the level I've shown in 2A. It's also a picture that gives you the chemical inside shown at 2B. The point is you can do this many, many times. This is a figure from one of my colleagues, David Stewart and his group. What he's done and others is to look at where all lots of antibodies bind on the surface of the receptor-binding domain of COVID-19 spike protein, which is the protein that's used in the vaccines. And he's seen, as you see, that if you characterize the receptor-binding domain as being a bit like David's torso, some of the antibodies go in at the neck. Some of them go in at the right shoulder. In fact, it's those at the right shoulder which turned out to be particularly powerful because it's an unusual site. Again, we're going to leave all this in one moment. But I just want to get that point across, the mechanistic aspect, the mechanistic lens is extremely powerful, before I go on to think about where that mechanistic perspective is coming from and actually how people are getting it, which is of the real interest here. But I needed to get that established, okay?

So now the final thing to say is that, before we move away from looking just at the science, is to say that, clearly, we're using analogies with respect to engineering potentially here, in bioscience. People often talk about levers and springs and hinges, right? They talk about they mutate the hinges to stop them working and so on. There's a whole world of talking about biological molecules in terms of middle-sized objects, right? Again, that might not work, but it does work rather well. It's just another way of emphasizing the power of the mechanistic as a lens, right? This is just an example of three. It's just myosin. The thing that you can actually see is a molecule at B and C at 3 is myosin, which is the thing which allows our muscles to move. And as you can see, it's got two different states: pre-stroke and post-stroke. That's what is enabling my arm to move now, of course. In here were little myosin molecules doing this and enabling my myosin and my striated muscle in my arm to work against the active filaments in my arm to enable me to do this. So it works as a phenomenon. It worked as a descriptor, okay? It's powerful. But there's also something slightly kind of odd about that. Because it's quite poetic, isn't it, in itself? Right? There's something very analogical there. Because we're talking about something which is actually rather, what is very biological. It's very dynamic, right? Proteins are not static things. The pictures look static. They're not static. They're very dynamic. There's huge amounts of going on in them, and yet we can actually analogize them as being a bit like bits of clocks or just levers in other kinds of mechanical devices. That's quite interesting. There's something analogical there. There's something potentially a little bit poetic there already, which I think is quite interesting potentially.

But let's talk about more kind of fundamental ways in which delight, enchantment you might say, plays a key role in science. So play. 4, we have Christopher Robin playing Poohsticks. It's going to be a specific reference to Poohsticks in a moment. But scientists are engaged in a playful process when they interact with the world. From earliest days as children, we classify things. And I think that is part of our growth into scientists — grouping blocks which are the same size or the same color, or lining things up which we start to do as children. It's something that, really, we're just doing more and more of as we become adults and trained as scientists. We fit objects to one another. We kind of make things fit together, and we'll come back to ideas about fit in a minute. We infer a purpose if we play with toys, and we sort of imagine the toys doing this or the toys talking to me. There's a sort

of inference of purpose there which I think the scientist is in some way still doing not so consciously, but I think there's an element there of how we're training ourselves to think in ways which will be useful. Hypothesis formation is a kind of form of fantasy, right? It's sort of thinking about how might things be, how do these things look together. Toys are a really important way in which scientists do their work. Experiments use equipment. Scientists' attitude to their equipment is rather like the attitude of children to toys, okay? In a sense, also, they squabble over them, right? If somebody has a bigger toy, I want that big toy. Right? We've got the biggest toy. This toy is very expensive. You can only use it if you give me a lot of money. So there's a lot there around playfulness, which the scientist really is engaged in. That is a lot of what's going on, is this playfulness. That's one set of ways. And the reason why I said I refer to Poohsticks again is that, and in fact one of the techniques I have used a lot. In fact, there's a school of techniques which involve looking basically at how molecules move through fluids or move through a vacuum. But it's useful to see how fast molecules move under a particular force because it helps you to understand aspects of their mass and their shape. And in the end, isn't Poohsticks just seeing how objects move in a medium under a particular force? You stick the stick in the stream, and it rolls. Then if the stick is large or small, that will affect how it flows. And so if it hits a rock, that will affect how it flows. So we use equipment which, in some ways, is interacting with small molecules and proteins, nucleic acids, whatever, in ways which are analogous to the way of a child sticking a stick into a river.

Now, let's just move further towards talking more specifically about beauty. Essentially, what I'm saying is that when we grapple with the world, the reason why we're doing that as scientist is because we are enchanted by it. Because we perceive something that delights us. I think we are like a child at play telling stories about the world when we're a scientist. Talking to scientists, we can't stop talking about beauty. So many of my colleagues are constantly saying, "Oh, it's so beautiful. It's such beautiful result. This is a lovely set of data and so on." Then we represent our data in ways which are aesthetically pleasing. Some of you may have found or may find these images bewildering. But sometimes people will find the kind of images scientists produce beautifully in some sense in themselves even if they don't quite know what they're showing. The key thing I wanted to point out here is that when I'm using the word "beautiful" as a scientist, I am using it in an everyday kind of way. I'm not a philosopher. I'm not an expert in ethics, but I know what beautiful means. Beautiful means I'm delighted by something. I want to see more of it. I'm glad I've seen it. I value it for itself. And so my rose petal here — just to point this out and then maybe an opportunity for me to tell that I go talk quite a lot to tell about the Scottish author A.L. Kennedy later about a rose petal. But I'll leave that on one side. The point is that the rose petal elicits a certain response from us. And I don't think that the response of a scientist to seeing data is fundamentally different. It is different in terms of how they've been trained, the level at which they're seeing the beauty, maybe the meaning it has for them. But in some sense, the response has a relationship to the way I respond to an ordinary, beautiful object. I'm glad it's there. I value it for itself. That's the key thing. I value it for itself.

I'm now going to talk very quickly about just specific forms of beauty just because they categorize the kinds of beauty scientists see. Form and fit is one way in which scientists perceive beauty. 6A is examples of form and fit. The molecule EDTA, that's actually one of the reasons I became a scientist. It's because I was excited by this as a kid at school. I thought the way this molecule fitted around metal ions was really lovely. I don't know why, but I did. And so that led me to become a biochemist. Then the second thing is from my own work. You can see I hope how the purple thing on the right-hand side at 6A, which is RNA, fits to the the blue and the green and the yellow and the cyan which is a protein complex that's just binding to this piece of RNA. That piece of RNA is actually a very important piece of RNA in suppressing cancer. The protein that's bound to it, the other colors, the protein that's bound to it is trying to stop it doing that. But you can see how there's form and there's fit. These things fit each other. That, to me, as a scientist is aesthetically pleasing. It's the kind of thing that makes me want to be a scientist, maybe want to be a scientist, and keeps me at it. 6B is obviously a DNA. 6B on the left is the cartoon that Watson and Crick published in 1953. DNA on the right is obviously a molecular structure. Clearly, Watson and Crick were correct in what they hypothesized. But the way they write the paper is idealistic. They say, "How would it be as we put these data together?" This kind of fits, right? It's written not in a kind of very systematic, scientific way. It's actually written taking bits of data from various sources and coming up with an idea that is beautiful and makes sense and is extremely powerful, as you all know, and as they said themselves with full modesty. But again, it's form and fit, okay? Here, there's a way in which there's logic and the simplicity here that the scientists are seeing.

I also want to highlight that the scientist values things as beautiful because there's something inherently unique about them. Now, that applies to the rose petal as well. The rose petal is beautiful because it's unique. It's a rose petal I found on the ground and I took home, right? But also, at 6C, that's a picture of the inside of a cell done using electron microscopy. Obviously, it's been false colored. It's a 3D representation of the inside of a cell. It's extremely packed. It's very information dense. But it's unique, right? No cell looks like any other cell. So one of the forms of beauty scientists see is the uniqueness, the fact you can understand that cell and that cell is in that state. There's an aspect there, I think, of the aesthetic delight there. There's also an element in which symmetry is often talked about by people in science and also people imagining what beauty for scientists might mean. Clearly, symmetry is important. Clearly symmetry is an important part. It's an ideal way of understanding things. My examples here are Buckminsterfullerene (C60) spherical carbon, which follows the same. It's icosahedral symmetry. So same symmetry as a football. Bluetongue virus is another example of the same symmetry. But the bluetongue virus is 100 million atomic mass units, 100 million daltons. The buckminsterfullerene is 720. So that's about 140,000 times difference in mass. The same symmetry basically applies. Scientists like this, right? These people who studied this, they think this is lovely, and it helps them understand the way things are. But it's not only about symmetry. That's why I've only put it in as a minor element here. The HIV, you can see the symmetry is not the same. The symmetry is broken. But actually, underlying symmetry is the same. It also consists of a load of pentagonal and hexagonal structures come together just like a football, just like C60, just like Bluetongue virus. But they've been distorted in the way they're arranged, so the symmetry is somehow broken. That allows HIV to be as it is.

I'm sorry. I'll be finished in just a minute. Now, so the point is then that there's a sense in which we, scientists, have a lot of different ways in which they perceive beauty in the world. In this, they can be awestruck by what they see, or they can be overwhelmed. Or maybe 6C looks a bit overwhelming. In a way, it does to me. But then also, scientists may find a way to make sense of what they're studying by getting into the detail and really understanding it, yes, in a mechanical way. There's also I think a kind of enchantment in the fundamental belief that there's purpose to be found in the molecular structure, that there's a reason why it is the way it is and the way in which it operates. It's interesting, Charles, at the end of Cosmic Connections, you make the very interesting point about ethics. That even if we haven't got better, people want to be seen to be obeying ethics. Similarly, scientists want to be seen to be obeying the rules even if they're not, even if they're a bit sly. And if they do try and kill each other's grants, they actually want to be seen as ethical. So it's an interesting point. So we have a kind of belief in what we're doing as something which is of ethical value, that it has purpose, and we're seeing purpose in what we study.

Finally, in terms of my examples, before I wrap up, in terms of representation of science—this is thinking more of in terms of the public domain—7 is not a scientific result. It's a bit of artistic representation of the inside of a cell by Dave Goodsell from Harvard. He's done many of these. The point is, we can then represent things to the world which give us an insight into the complexity of what we're studying, and those things in themselves have some kind of aesthetic value. Deep space images, such as that on the right at 7, from the Hubble telescope, they clearly elicit from the general public a profound response, something which is seen as beautiful. Also awe inspiring. Possibly, terrifying. But to bring it together, in all, I think that enchantment—which I characterized at the beginning as having various aspects in science—I think is essential to scientific work from the beginning to the end because it reflects interest in what we study. If we're not willing to be enchanted, moved by what we study, then I don't think we'll understand it. The alternative is to be bored by something. If you just look at something and you're bored by it, you just sort of see the surface of it. When we are enchanted by things, whether it is something scientific or the natural environment, we forget about ourselves. We have a kind of ecstatic experience. And I think that experience of forgetting ourselves and immersing ourselves in what we study is an important aspect of how the scientist achieves what they achieve. As I say, it's as if we're addressed by what we study.

I would also want to say, and this again is a reference back to Cosmic Connections, you might almost suggest that the world has kind of changed out there by the scientific enchantment that scientists have, by the perception and the knowledge we gain in here, as it were, or between ourselves. It kind of changes the world. It is as if it creates an interspace, a new way of understanding things that scientist maybe can particularly grasp. But through representation for public benefit, maybe it can be grasped more widely. And this does come back to what Naomi was saying. I think there's a sense in which when you see the meaning of things, it's as if suddenly you perceive something that you couldn't see before. So, Naomi, you were talking about the ways in which suddenly, yes, it's an epiphanic moment, in which it's almost as if when you look at data and you can't quite see the pattern. There's nothing there to see. And suddenly, there is something to see. There's a real change, a real switch. I'm saying that may actually, it's a real change in reality. That you know that. Maybe you're the first person ever to know that. That changes reality, right? But it is coming from a resonance that you have with what you're studying. So in speaking of enchantment in scientists, I am using enchantment as a synonym for love. If we are enchanted by things, we value things, and we think they're beautiful, we delight in them, I think we love them because we want them to be what they are, and we want to understand them how they are. Of course, this comes back to the old thing of loving what you study and studying what you love. That's how you gain knowledge. As I say, this particular response is illicit.

I want to end by just saying that Cosmic Connections ends with the thought that the loss of one mode of connection on one way of being connected, one way of experiencing enchantment, the loss of that creates space for another which suggests the constant human desire for such enchantment. I suggest that science may be one of those ways in which human beings have come to seek enchantment in a disenchanted world, and maybe that science is a vehicle for realizing that. I'm actually going to end with a quotation from David Bentley Hart, who I've found a very helpful companion, I suppose, in reading what he's written as I've thought my own thoughts. In his book published this year All Things Are Full of Gods, which is a dialogue—not a dialogue. It's a four-way conversation anyway, so it can't be a dialogue or a tetralogue. Anyway, one of the characters—I suspect it's Hermes. I can't quite remember—is talking about the persistence of the desire to find enchantment, which is what I'm talking about as science as a reflection of that. This character says in All Things Are Full of God, "Their..." Their being us. Remember, these are gods talking. These are four gods: Eros, Hermes, Havestian, and Psyche. The four gods and Hermes probably, I think, is saying, their, us humans, "Their nature dictates that they can never be at home in a world that doesn’t speak. This is why it is that even now, in their disenchanted age, they delight in fables about talking animals, and in stories that infuse inanimate objects with consciousness and personality, and in any other kind of tale that tells them that there’s a subjective depth in all things that knows them as they would wish to be known."

(outro)

Brandon: Alright, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.