Lewis Thomas (1913–1993)

Not what I expected, but I was pleasantly surprised. This book was given to me by a LibraryThing member. I was not familiar with Lewis Thomas. The book was published in 1974. The first essay or two made me afraid it would be a treatise to the absence of God in the world, due to the findings of science, but I liked the author's positive tone and his marvel of the world around him. Then I read the essays on medical research and practice and they were beautiful and inspiring. His essays ripple show more with the light touch of humor, the depths of thinking and excitement for the future. Some of them are predictive considering they were written fifty years ago. Others are engaging in the plight of humanity. One of his hobbies is language and the origins thereof, and so several essays discuss word origins and are quite playful. show less

In 1974, Lewis Thomas wrote in 'The Lives of a Cell' that the function of humans is communication:

'We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.'

Thirty-some years later, with the twittering Internet and its newsgroups, email, websites, and media, these words show real prescience.

'Or perhaps we are only at the beginning of learning to use the system, with almost all our evolution show more as a species still ahead of us. Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind...are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later, analogous to the prokaryotic cells that drifted through shallow pools in the early days of biological evolution. Later, when the time is right, there may be fusion and symbiosis among the bits, and then we will see eukaryotic thought, metazoans of thought, huge interliving coral shoals of thought.

The mechanism is there [n.b.: in the human brain], and there is no doubt that it is already capable of functioning...

We are simultaneously participants and bystanders, which is a puzzling role to play. As participants, we have no choice in the matter; this is what we do as a species.' show less

A collection of very short essays from the 1970s in which Lewis Thomas, a medical researcher, muses about various topics related to medicine, biology, and nature. He is particularly interested in mitochondria, social insects and the ways in which human society does or doesn't resemble theirs, and the importance of basic research in medical science.

This is regarded as a real classic of science writing, or at least of writing by a scientist, so it's a little surprising it took me this long to show more get to it. I must say that, when I first started it, I didn't exactly think it was living up to its reputation. The essays here are really tiny, more a series of individual thoughts than anything else. And Thomas not infrequently uses some technical terms without explaining them, which I didn't find too much of a problem, but which does make it feel less accessible than I was expecting. He also engages in a fair amount of speculation and the occasional flight of fancy that aren't at all scientific, which bugs me possibly more than it ought to.

But the more I read, the more I came to appreciate Thomas's writing. It's rather beautiful, always thoughtful and often thought-provoking, and laced with subtle wit. And although it is very much of its time, aside from a few now-humorous remarks about computers, it's actually aged quite well.

So. Do I still think Lewis Thomas is over-hyped, for lack of a better phrase? Well, yes, a bit. But he is still good. show less

Lewis Thomas is a name I remember from my undergraduate days; my biology professors were fond of quoting him. I knew very little about him other than the fact that he wrote scientific essays in polished prose and was evidentally at one time quite well known even among the general public. But fame is fleeting and few of those who came of scientific age after his death in 1993 recognize his name. I suppose ten years hence Stephen Jay Gould will be equally obscure.

I discovered a first edition show more of this book in the famed "Strand" used bookstore during a recent trip to Manhattan. I was amazed at its physical appearance -- the pages had not yellowed, nor was the cover the garish psychedelic mess that books from the early 1970s tended to have. In short, the book would look quite in place in a modern bookstore. Having now read the slender tome, I would have to say that the contents seem (with few exceptions) equally modern.

Much like many of Stephen Jay Gould's books, "The Lives of a Cell" is a collection of essays originally printed elsewhere. In this case, the venue was the New England Journal of Medicine, but thankfully (in my opinion, at least) they mostly deal with issues of basic biology. The first thing I noticed was that Thomas used the term "genome" quite frequently and without explanation -- while few people today would fail to understand the term, I wonder what people in 1974 made of it; I myself don't recall hearing the term until 1991, when I met a student of Fred Blattner's who was working on the E. coli genome, and even as late as 1997 I recall having to explain the term to my parents. Secondly, it is interesting how obsessed Thomas seemed to be with endosymbiosis. Repeatedly, the theme that eukaryotic cells as we know them could not exist without the endosymbiotic help of mitochondria and chloroplasts is brought up. This also adds to the modern feel of the book because in recent years endosymbiosis has become a popular topic again as genome sequencing has allowed more detailed studies of endosymbionts and their relation to free living microbes to be undertaken. Thomas even suggested a genome project (although not in so many words): Mixotricha paradoxa, a protist that moves by the work of embedded endosymbiotic spriochetes -- in other words, its "limbs" are actually other organisms.

Other topics that Thomas addresses also are quite modern -- Thomas' pleas that biology look beyond the traditional reductionistic approach to look at entire systems are more or less identical with the sorts of editorials on the subject that one reads today, and his assertions that language has a biological basis predate Pinker's by decades.

The only things that don't quite hold up are Thomas' thoughts on international politics (which were understandably mired in the dated topics of the Cold War and fears of US-USSR nuclear war), and his view on computers, which like that of many people of his time, was based on the misunderstanding (propagated from films from the 1950's onward) that computers were genuinely thinking machines rather than simply fancy programmable calculators.

I highly recommend this book -- the essays are well written in much the same sort of style that Gould would later use, and it is simply amazing that it dates from 1974. show less