Blurring the lines between living and non-living matter

Caitlin Stobie & Paul Beales

Caitlin Stobie is an internationally published poet and short story writer based in Leeds, where she recently completed her PhD in English Literature. Her creative practice is informed by the relationship between human and nonhuman bodies. It explores connections between literature and biology, focusing particularly on environmental and medical issues.

Paul Beales is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry, with a multidisciplinary scientific background in physics, chemical engineering and chemistry. His core research is in soft matter and biophysics, interested in fundamental scientific questions through to applications of these materials.

In particular, the majority of his work focuses on the properties and applications of biological and biomimetic membranes. Fundamentally, he investigates the structure and properties of biomembranes and how they are perturbed by interactions with peptides, proteins and nanoparticles. For applications, he is interested in their use for drug formulation and delivery as nanomedicines, enabling biotechnology applications. His current recent is looking at developing a peptide from wasp venom that has cancer-fighting properties. His group has a long-term interest in trying to build artificial cells from their fundamental constituents.

As a researcher in the School of English, Caitlin’s work is often engaged with immaterial concepts, but she also operates within the philosophical field of New Materialism. Collaborating with Paul meant she was re-engaging with language she hadn’t used since high school. To begin to understand his work, they used a shared drive in the cloud — itself immaterial and abstract — to see images to visualise the work of Paul’s lab.

For Paul, the Creative Labs were an opportunity not just to communicate about his own research but also to engage with New Materialism — a branch of philosophy that examines agency in non-human and inanimate matter — and how it proposes a continuum between human and non-human matter. As Paul and his group are researching how to build an artificial cell and add life-like properties, engaging with the concepts of New Materialism meant a consideration of how they are blurring the boundaries between living and non-living.

In particular, the collaborators discussed the concepts of intra-action, which is going beyond simply looking at the interactions between materials and emergence, where you examine the composite system properties which aren’t there in the individual components.

Caitlin engaged with the students in Paul’s lab through images and snippets of interactions, and chose to respond to the ethical implications of the work they are undertaking. When looking at an image of a cell, she was particularly struck by a comment by one researcher, who told her “what we’re going to look at is frozen in time and space.”

Another image had been split into three parts, separated into green, blue and red hues in order to show different aspects of the specimen. It was only by layering these images on top of each other that the viewer could see a complete image, but the information each separate layer showed could not be gathered without stripping out the other layers first.

In response to this process, Caitlin wrote a poetic work in three layers, with abstract and evocative words and phrases which were separately written in green, blue and red. When all the poems were layered together, they created a fourth, complete poem titled ‘grimace scale’ — the method used by scientists to detect whether an animal is feeling pain.

Leeds Creative Labs is the pioneering programme from the Cultural Institute at the University of Leeds. It connects researchers with creative professionals to spend three days together without any expectation of an outcome. The experience is characterised by playfulness, curiosity and creativity.

This collaboration was part of Leeds Creative Labs: Bragg Edition, which aims to explore innovation, impact and sustainability in materials research. Professor Lorna Dougan and Dr Scott McLaughlin played a crucial role in the development of the edition, with funding from the University of Leeds Interdisciplinary Pump-Priming Fund.