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Good Morning.

The way science works can be bewildering. The pandemic has sloganized ideas of being ‘led by’ or ‘following’ the science. The sheer pace at which the three vaccines announced over recent days have been developed leaves us breathless, and with practical and political challenges in their delivery. But there is another, much more ancient, way of thinking about science that these new achievements have reminded me of.

Those of us who have worked in science for years can get lost in its daily business of course, but every so often we still pause and just gaze at what we know about nature, from the formation of stars to the structures deep within living cells, and simply wonder at the human ability to think of these things at all.

Einstein once quipped that ‘the most inexplicable thing about the universe is that it is explicable.’ And when we read how people are working with the biology of COVID to develop these vaccines, when we visualise a tiny pearl-necklace of molecules strung together that code for a piece of virus; when we imagine it encapsulated inside what is essentially an invisibly small soap bubble; picture that bubble’s skin delicately dusted with electric charges so that it combines with our own cells in just the right place; in our mind’s eye watch it triggering an immune response to protect against the actual virus – then I think we can see what Einstein meant. It is a response to science similar to the way we might enjoy a poem or piece of music.

Such contemplative, almost meditative, way into nature through science can seem strange now, but it’s the way science was always framed until modern times, and why it used to be called ‘natural philosophy’ – simply the love of wisdom to do with nature.

There is a beautiful poem in the ancient Biblical book of Job that illustrates this uniquely human ability to gaze into the deep structure of the world. ‘Not even the hawk with her sharp eyes,’ runs the poem, ‘can see what the miner perceives underground – the veins of silver and gold, the jewels formed there by fire.’

It’s no coincidence that this poem sits within a book that responds with staggering honesty to human grief and pain. For it is at times of suffering, like now, that deepening insights into nature can heal not only body but also mind. God opened a window into the natural world to Job that he found restorative. I believe the same window is held open for us too, and for some, could offer in a fresh way the same double work of healing.

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