Gillian Ferguson was never much of a science student. The memory of an early O-grade chemistry lesson at school prompts an embarrassed chuckle from the Edinburgh-born poet.

“I seem to remember that I created mass during an experiment when that was supposed to be impossible to do,” she says with a grin. “It wasn't my forte, so I did more art and dropped chemistry.”

Yet as a writer, Ferguson found herself studying science again, and getting to grips with one of its most complex topics: the human genome, the genetic code required to create a human.

Ferguson's first book of poetry, Air for Sleeping Fishes, was published in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Her second, Baby: Poems on Pregnancy, Birth and Babies, which came out in 2001, was a collection based on the birth of her son, Comrie, who is now nine years old. It has been published in Britain and America.

What inspired Ferguson to turn her attention to science for her next project was the language that politicians, scientists and journalists used to describe the completion in 2003 of the identification of every gene in the human genome - a race that in 2000 prompted Bill Clinton, then the American president, to comment: “We are learning the language in which God created life.”

Ferguson set out to write a collection of poems based on the subject. So, four years ago, she began to learn about genetics from scratch and quickly became immersed in the subject.

“The level I started at was the BBC science website, which used to have quite a lot about genetics on it,” she explains. “Once you get into one website, that takes you onto others. I read a lot of Charles Darwin, because I didn't want to go into it being too humble, saying, ‘Oh yeah, I'll come out with a crumb of understanding.'

“And I like to think I'm quite brainy, so it wasn't like I was saying, ‘I'm not going to bother reading anything about this' and I was flailing around. Although I'm an artist, my degree [from Edinburgh University] is in philosophy, so I'm used to reading difficult texts.”

Having received a £25,000 Creative Scotland Award to write her collection, she scoured textbooks, newspaper articles and online research papers for information.

She was particularly inspired by philosopher Mary Midgley, who has written widely about science and is a fierce critic of the reductionism that seems to lie behind much scientific thought. Midgley's view is that in attempting to understand the world, there are “many maps, many windows”. Ferguson found that the human genome was a subject so expansive that studying it was like diving into a giant lake, served by hundreds of tributaries worth exploring.

Interviewing scientists about the significance of mapping the genome and what it tells us about our evolution as a species prompted Ferguson to include their words in her work.

The result is an extensive sprawl of poetry, interspersed with quotations, that she has posted on the internet. Her aim is to highlight the implications of understanding the genetic core of humans, and how it relates so closely to other species. She sees her work as “a bridge between art and science” rather than an instructive exercise and uses metaphor and imagery, rather than the language of science, to explore the human genome.

One of the few poems to include direct scientific terms is DNA, which begins, “DNA - or deoxyribonucleic acid - a mouthful which should be a poem, adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, which should be the names of angels”.

The work coincided with a spell living in a remote cottage in the West Highlands, where Ferguson watched the daily habits of sheep and shared the property with a family of mice, further keening her sense of wonder at how varied life on earth is, despite the genetic connections. Humans share genes with other species, it is just that they are switched off in our DNA.

“We have 99% genetic similarity with mice, which is fantastical,” she says. “Worms have the same muscle propulsion genes. We could make a tail if the gene wasn't switched off, or wings. Even people, there's a 0.01% difference in the genome of every person on earth.”

In learning about genetics, Ferguson found herself moving into associated subjects such as GM crops and cloning, which, in turn, inspired further poems. When she printed a copy of her work out, it ran to a thousand pages.

The poems have been endorsed by such eminent scientists as Francis Collins, head of the United States Human Genome Project, and Sir John Sulston, his UK counterpart. “I had a much more supportive reaction from scientists,” she adds. “From poets, there were hostile comments about whether a poet could legitimately contend with science. But the arts are a good way into science, as a way of glimpsing the meaning of something. Wordsworth didn't think there was any science that a poet shouldn't be able to enter into.”

Even now, having completed her work, Ferguson still tracks the latest genetic developments. She can't let science go.

The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life is at www.thehumangenome.co.uk

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