We have one of Mr. Merwin's poems tacked up on our office wall, to remind us that the scientific research enterprise is a deeply human, and humanistic, endeavor. Well, that's what the poem means to us, but you cannot blame the poet for this reading, because once you release a poem into the world, you cannot be held responsible for whatever people might read into it.
The poem is:
The Long and the Short of ItAs long as we can believe anythingwe believe in measurewe do it with the first breath we takeand the first sound we makeit is in each word we learnand in each of them it meanswhat will come again and whenit is there in meal and in moonand in meaning it is the meaningit is the firmament and the furrowturning at the end of the fieldand the verse turning with its breathit is in memory that keeps telling ussome of the old story about us
Measurement is critical. We have great wine, beer, cheese, food, etc because over the eons craftspeople learned how to measure, everything to do with making them, using their senses, to guide development of the processes to make them. Right now, biomedicine is hampered by a lack of real bioassay (measurement) techniques. Consider reading Koestler's "The Case of The Midwife Toad" about the life of Paul Kammerer, who could measure aspects of life's workings no one else could. Learn how to measure, and you can learn how to master.
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