GoKawiilResearcher-poets use verse to help to ease isolation and grief, sing the praises of nature or depict the joys of commuting by bicycle.Credit: WeBond Creations/Getty
Last year, in a moving family farewell celebration, palliative-care physician and researcher Danielle Chammas said goodbye to a long-time patient with cancer. When Chammas came home afterwards, she wrote a poem. Her Defiance, which was later published in the journal JAMA Oncology, describes the woman as “the leaf clinging fiercely to the tree” (D. Chammas JAMA Oncol. 12, 215; 2026).
With family at bedside,/ and the beau’s guitar/ filling the room,/ the leaf released the tree,/ and she knew,/ for the briefest of moments,/ what it meant to fly.
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Chammas, who works at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), says her patient “would have walked through fire to stay in her daughter’s life” and didn’t let cancer dictate how she was going to die.
Chammas also co-directs the Poetic Medicine programme at the UCSF MERI Center for Humanity in Healthcare. The centre researches the art of poem-making to help with grief and “aims to cultivate spaces where voices are valued, connections are made, and healing is nurtured”, she explains. At weekly online meetings, clinicians, carers, patients and members of the public are invited to listen to poems and write their own. Participants join from around the world. Chammas often shares the works of poets such as the US writer Maya Angelou and the thirteenth-century Persian mystic Rumi with people in her care.
“The humanities are foundational to my ability to do my clinical work,” Chammas says, because poetry enables her to “truly accompany somebody through something unthinkable”. That process, she says, is as fundamental to her work “as my knowledge of how opiates hit pain-modulating mu receptors”.
Science and poetry might seem like an odd pairing. One deals in facts; the other, seemingly, in feelings. But the two fields don’t negate each other, Chammas says. “We live in a very dualistic and binary culture, good or bad, healthy or sick, living or dying, optimists or pessimists. But I think we do ourselves and our society a real disservice if that’s our only way of seeing the world.” Poetry taps into “the multitudes that are in us” and is “a really beautiful way to open our minds”, she says.
Indeed, physicians and scientists can be poets, too. For instance, the physician William Carlos Williams and the immunologist Miroslav Holub wrote and published highly praised poems. The mathematician Ada Lovelace, widely recognized as an inventor of computer programming, also invented her own genre, called poetical science, which brings together abstract mathematics and the imagination. Of the Analytical Engine, a mechanical computing machine conceived by Charles Babbage in the 1830s, Lovelace wrote that it “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”.
Like Lovelace, poetry-writing researchers and physicians interviewed by Nature’s careers team describe how poetry can meld seamlessly with science. Many draw inspiration from scientific phenomena and nature, such as fish, hurricanes, the climate crisis and even electricity pylons. They aim to translate the wonder and beauty of the world of tiny molecules and the one visible around us into words. By pouring their scientific knowledge into poetic forms, they often find fresh ways of understanding complex problems and developing solutions.
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