Chapter 1 makes the case for literature’s value to science policy and reveals how literary scholars can enter the field. With the growth of interdisciplinary policy committees, which draw on experts from all across the university and the public sphere, humanists have the opportunity to speak to urgent questions about the social implications of science. Because culture affects public attitudes toward science, policy committees need the expertise of humanists who study literature, film, myth, metaphor, and symbolic structures to strengthen their understanding of cultural influences on policy concerns. Literary study brings new archives, new methods, new approaches to scientific language, and new pedagogies to the field of public policy. Focusing on Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, the chapter shows how a novel can deepen our understanding of an important policy issue like the misguided belief in genetic determinism.

Often misread by policy analysts who oppose stem cell research, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau actually presents a balanced view of science, warning against unethical scientists but suggesting ways in which the creation of chimeras would be ethically acceptable. Wells’s novel articulates principles that foreshadow the conditions bioethicists today have proposed for research on human-non-human chimeras, research that could lead to advances in treating Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, organ transplants, and more. Wells’s relation to his mentor, Thomas Huxley, dramatizes the importance of reading literary works in historical perspective and sheds light on disciplinary specialization and the two-culture split.

The Preface begins with autobiography, explaining how a scholar of literature became interested in genetics and public policy. It describes how the author’s training in literary and cultural studies proved valuable to analyzing public attitudes toward science, a topic of importance to public policy. The book focuses on time in genetics and narrative, concentrating on three periods when literature’s perspectives on the life sciences were critical: the late-nineteenth-century reaction to Darwin; the period running from the 1920s through the Cold War, when the modern synthesis of evolution with genetics was developed in dialogue with the concept of modernity; and the twenty-first century, the age of “genome time.”