Writer in Residence - Carol Clewlow
Carol Clewlow was the first PEALS Writer in Residence, from Autumn 2000 to Spring 2002. She has this to say about her time at PEALS:
'I wanted the Peal's writer-in-residence job pretty much more than I've wanted
any job in my life. Not because I had any facility for science but because I
was so lousy at it. (I'm not about to quote you my O level results - it's too
embarassing). 
I wanted the job because of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which is more than anything else a gut expression of the way science and fiction need to walk hand in hand together. Because Frankenstein is not an aberration and neither is the PEALS writers' residency. Neither is there anything studiously trendy or cosmetic about having a fiction writer work in a scientific environment. In fact it's vital, a necessity. Because without the arts, and most of all fiction, science is mute, unable to express itself or make itself comprehensible to the world. It needs the imagery and the metaphors of fiction and without them becomes sterile, quite possibly dangerous. It's no accident that good science writing is littered with examples from literature. Because the fiction writer's job, the poet's too, is to deal with the human heart, with the expression of feelings and emotions, and that includes both the admiration, fear and horror which are the human responses to scientific discovery.
At the same time, it's a two-way street this one labelled Science and Art. Maybe the most important thing I took away from the placement was the realisation that if we claim the whole of human life to be our remit as fiction writers, then to know nothing of science or worse to be disinterested - particularly in the age in which we live - is a gross dereliction of duty.'