Bruce Deitrick Price 2008-04-09
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Lewis Thomas is that odd trifecta: a learned scientist; a speculative philosopher; and a master of prose both gracious and graceful.
The Lives of a Cell is a book of 29 essays originally written for the New England Journal of Medicine. They are short; they are light and airy; they are pretty; they are fun. Teenagers could enjoy them. But these essays are fundamentally serious and scientific. Lewis is always on the hunt for the cosmic insight or deeper truth.
His mind works metaphorically. He seeks interconnections. A recurring motif is to wonder whether social animals such as ants are like cells or more like human societies or perchance like the planet earth. Here is a celebrated quote:
"I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell."
This book was a bestseller around 1975 and won the National Book Award. Everyone seemed to be reading it. I read it. I recently ordered it again because I thought it might contain a tidbit for a video I was making called How To Teach Science. No such luck, but this is a book anyone could enjoy reading twice. Most of it remains in the present. It is finally the most readable of science books. Here are two more samples:
"My cells are no longer the pure line entities I was raised with; they are ecosystems more complex than Jamaica Bay. I like to think that they work in my interest, that each breath they draw for me, but perhaps it is they who walk through the local park in the early morning, sensing my senses, listening to my music, thinking my thoughts."
"Viewed from a suitable height, the aggregating clusters of medical scientists in the bright sunlight of the boardwalk at Atlantic city, swarmed there from everywhere for the annual meetings, have the look of assemblages of social insects. There is the same vibrating, ionic movement, interrupted by the darting back and forth of jerky individuals to touch antennae and exchange small bits of information..."
For anyone thinking of writing non-fiction, this is an ultimate text book. Apparently Thomas learned his style from Montaigne. Good luck on that.
For anyone thinking of a career in science, Thomas shows the advantages of being partly a generalist, of being in your field and outside your field--the better to see some strange shadow or artifact that nobody else has noticed.
Epilogue: I ordered a used copy from an Amazon dealer in the northwest USA. Stuck in the book was an old ticket to a music concert (George Winston, solo piano; Wikipedia says he has been called The Father of New Age Music). Date of ticket: 1985. City: Norfolk, Va., where I am now. That's the sort of goofy loop that Thomas could build an essay on. What's more New Age than Amazon?
