One of the big ideas we have for the UCSD-Clarion relationship focuses on the thin line between creativity in storytelling and creativity in science.   Stumbling across the web today and landing on Magic Dragon, I bumped into Ursula K. Le Guin’s description of the “creative spark” behind her cloning-focused story Nine Lives:

I had been reading The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rattray Taylor, a splendid book for biological ignoramuses, and had been intrigued by his chapter on the cloning process. I knew a little about cloning… but so little that I had not got past carrots, where it all started, to speculate about the notion of duplicating entire higher organisms, such as frogs, donkeys, or people. I did not have to read between the lines: Rattray Taylor did it for me. He pointed out that some biologists have been contemplating these more ambitious possibilities quite seriously (why don’t people ever ask biologists where they get their ideas from?). In thinking about this possibility, I found it alarming. I began to see that the duplication of anything complex enough to have personality would involve the whole issue of what personality is — the question of individuality, of identity, of selfhood. Now that question is a hammer that rings the great bells of Love and Death….

So I found a biologist to ask: Gabriele Wienhausen, UCSD’s Associate Dean of Biological Sciences for Undergraduate Education, agrees that this way of looking at science is something universities need to teach their students. The kind of approach Le Guin talks about, she continues, “is the science/society interface that we scientists shy away from talking about even though it’s something that our students want us to talk about.”  The students have personal, social and political concerns about the science they are being taught, she feels, and they are seeking the kind of dialogue Le Guin describes.  Gabriele, a Clarion Workshop fan from the first moment we thought of bringing it to UCSD, believes that science fiction can help scientists to bridge the communication hurdle.

One thing we tried last summer, and will try again this coming year, is to bring campus faculty together with the Clarion students every week on Friday afternoons around 3:00, on a come-if-you-want-to-basis when that week’s workshopping is done, to talk.  We’re going to sprinkle various people in; Gabriele for one, and Mark Thiemens from Chemistry; and we’re hoping for someone from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a couple of folks from Literature, Visual Arts and maybe Philosophy.  Just to talk, to see what happens.  Maybe the students will find a source for some future novel on asteroids, aerosol chemistry, or even glass-blowing.  Maybe we’ll learn something about the nature of creativity, and ways to spur it in our students.  You never know.