Lewis Thomas (1913–1993)

Several years ago an immunologist happened to tell me how much she admired The Lives of a Cell. Lucky for me, because now I’ve read it and there is much in it I hope not to forget.

Early in this charming collection of short essays, Lewis Thomas writes:
“Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. The families of weaver ants engage in show more child labor, holding their larvae like shuttles to spin out the thread that sews the leaves together for their fungus gardens. They do everything but watch television.”

Hmm . . . I gave up watching TV years ago so it appears the narrow ground differentiating me from an ant is now vanished. Well, I am lazier than an ant. I’ve never captured a slave, for example. Maybe that’s enough to claim I ain’t an ant! But probably I should just admit our kinship and go research which species it’d be best to enlist with.

After all, a large theme for Thomas is the sociability of organisms, their being together with their own kind, driven to finding relationships, congenial or not, with other kinds, forming dependencies capable of sustaining illusions of independence for the party that doesn’t understand the situation. It has about it something of the miraculous.

While reading The Lives of a Cell one becomes impressed by the scope of these relations, by the rarity of “separateness,” by little-known continua in life. This last idea is dramatically illustrated in the process of dying. Thomas shares in his essay “The Long Habit” the following remarkable intelligence:
“Judging from what has been found out thus far, from the first generation of people resuscitated from cardiac standstill…Those who remember parts or all of their episodes do not recall any fear, or anguish. Several people who remained conscious throughout, while appearing to have been quite dead, could only describe a remarkable sensation of detachment . . .
“In a recent study of the reaction of patients to dying of obstructive disease of the lungs, it was concluded that the process was considerably more shattering for the professional observers than the observed. Most of the patients appeared to be preparing themselves with equanimity for death, as though intuitively familiar with the business. One elderly woman reported that the only painful and distressing part of the process was in being interrupted; on several occasions she was provided with conventional therapeutic measures…and each time she found the experience of coming back harrowing; she deeply resented the interference with her dying.”

What could speak more of the completeness of life’s preparations for the living individual in all its natural events?

In what Lewis Thomas tells us, in The Lives of a Cell, the reader enjoys more than mere acquaintance with interesting information. The book quietly extends our perceptions and alters our perspectives. show less

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

This magnificent collection of essays by scientist and National Book Award-winning writer Lewis Thomas remains startlingly relevant for today's world. Luminous, witty, and provocative, the essays address such topics as "The Attic of the Brain, " "Falsity and Failure, " "Altruism, " and the effects of the federal government's virtual abandonment of support for basic scientific research will have on medicine and science. Profoundly and powerfully, Thomas questions the folly of nuclear show more weaponry, showing that t brainpower and money spent on this endeavor are needed much more urgently for the basic science we have abandoned--and that even medicine's most advanced procedures would be useless or insufficient in the face of the smallest nuclear detonation. And in the title essay, he addresses himself with terrifying poignancy to the question of what it is like to be young in the nuclear age. 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