In honor of National Poetry Month, we’re celebrating an underutilized method of communicating our science: poetry. According to Merriam-Webster, poetry is defined as, “writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.”
As proof that science can (and has) be conveyed through evocative language, consider the last line of a recent study that harnessed single-cell genomics to illuminate the microbial tree of life:
As the genomic tree is filled in,
we will witness for the first time
a global view of the evolutionary forces
that have shaped life on Earth.
– Rinke et al. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature12352
As we continue to learn more about untapped potential energy and environmental applications in the projects we’re working on, we think it’s only fair to uncover budding poets in the process as well.
Over the next few weeks we need your help in building up a poetry bank. We ask that your submissions must reference at least one of the following:
- JGI missions: bioenergy, carbon cycle, biogeochemistry
- JGI Science Programs: Plant, Fungi, Microbe, Metagenome, Synthetic Biology
Extra Credit: Working in a JGI organism (and we have over 5,000 to choose from!)
We welcome submissions in the following categories:
- Short and Sweet: Poem length of 140 characters (spaces included)
- Marking a Decade of the Community Science Program: Poem length cannot exceed 10 lines
- Building Blocks of Life: Poem solely composed of the single letter codes representing the 20 amino acids (A, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, Y)
Send us your submissions through our Facebook or Google+ pages. At the end of the month, we’ll highlight our favorites and showcase them. If we like your submission,we may send you a t-shirt.
UPDATE: Check out the poems we received here!