The Lives of a Cell

Lewis Thomas: The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (Lewis Thomas) (Penguin, 1978)

Lewis Thomas was one of those authors that Amazon was always recommending to me, so I picked up The Lives of a Cell to give him a try. I've enjoyed Stephen Jay Gould and John McPhee, so I thought I'd do all right.

These essays orignally appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in the early 1970's. Overall, I enjoyed them, but had a problem that I often have with Stephen Jay Gould's essays. Sometimes Thomas is reacting to something timely (in the 1970's), so you lose a little due to a lack of context. Sometimes Thomas is responding to an article in the Journal or another publication, so you may not have the background. The subject matter, as you'll see from the list of contents (below) is wide-ranging. Not as good an author as Carl Sagan (and I'll be posting on Sagan eventually), this is an author that I'm going to buy more books from and an author I'll revisit. Especially if I ever find that really good idea for a science fiction novel...

Counts as 29 contributions to the 2004 Short Story Project.

Contents: The Lives of a Cell; Thoughts for a Countdown; On Societies as Organisms; A Fear of Pheromones; The Music of This Sphere; "An Earnest Proposal"; "The Technology of Medicine"; "Vibes"; "Ceti"; "The Long Habit"; "Antaeus in Manhattan"; "The MBL"; "Autonomy"; "Organelles in Organisms"; "Germs"; "Your Very Good Health"; "Social Talk"; "Information"; "Death in the Open"; "Natural Science"; "Natural Man"; "The Iks"; "Computers"; "The Planning of Science"; "Some Biomythology"; "On Various Words"; "Living Language"; On Probability and Possibility; The World's Biggest Membrane.