Lewis Thomas
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Lewis Thomas (November 25 1913 - December 3, 1993) was a physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher.
Thomas was born in Flushing, New York and attended Princeton University and Harvard Medical School. He became Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute.
He was invited to write regular essays in the New England Journal of Medicine, and won a National Book Award for one of his collections of those essays, Lives of a Cell. He also won a Christopher Award for his essay. Two other collections of essays (from NEJM and other sources) are The Medusa and the Snail and Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. His autobiography, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher is a record of a century of medicine and the changes which occurred in it. He also published a book on etymology entitled Et Cetera, Et Cetera, poems, and numerous scientific papers. He also failed to graduate high school.
Many of his essays discuss relationships among ideas or concepts using etymology as a starting point. Others concerns the cultural implications of scientific discoveries and the growing awareness of ecology. In his essay on Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Thomas addresses the anxieties produced by the development of nuclear weapons. Thomas is noted for his eclectic interests and superlative prose style and is often quoted.
The Lewis Thomas Prize is awarded annually by The Rockefeller University to a scientist for artistic achievement.
Quotations
“The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed in human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.” --Lives of a Cell
"Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism." --Lives of a Cell
“It is my belief that childhood lasts considerably longer in males than in females.” --The Youngest Science
“I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can recall.” --The Youngest Science
"Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible....It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms." --Medusa and the Snail
"Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else." --Medusa and the Snail
“Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.” --Medusa and the Snail
“I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they’d be as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today’s identical twins.” --Medusa and the Snail
“Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal. But this is a hard argument to make when you have to depend on language to make it. You have to print out leaflets or publish books and get them bought and sent around, you have to turn up on television and catch the attention of millions of other human beings all at once, and then you have to say to them, all at once, all collected and paying attention: be solitary; do not depend on each other. You can’t do this and keep a straight face.” --Medusa and the Snail
"As a people we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally unhealthy about this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body."
"Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise."
Suggesting how the people of Earth should communicate with the universe: "I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later." --Lives of a Cellpt:Lewis Thomas