May 2007 | Back to Table of Contents

Book Review

A Biology Watcher's Notebook

By Charles R. Meyer, M.D.

Decades after they were written, lessons about the relationship between humans, nature, and molecular biology still hold true.

Lewis Thomas is a legend in the literature of medicine. Immersed in the culture of advanced medical research as president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center before his death in 1993, he nevertheless wrote in the language of a poet. Schooled in the intricacies of cellular and subcellular processes in the early days of molecular biology, he could still see the world widely through the eyes of a philosopher. Writing frequent columns entitled “Notes of a Biology Watcher” for the New England Journal of Medicine in the 1960s and ’70s and collected in the 1974 book The Lives of a Cell, he penned words that are still fresh and prescient in 2007.

Thomas the poet speaks in the first paragraph of the book—“We are told that the trouble with Modern Man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature. He sits in the topmost tiers of polymer, glass, and steel, dangling his pulsing legs, surveying at a distance the writhing life of the planet. In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds”—and proceeds to weave essays that elegantly illuminate the state of biological science and define man’s place in the cosmos.

The breadth of his biological knowledge was breathtaking, ranging from coelenterates to sea birds, from death-watch beetles to staphylococcal sepsis. Whatever he described became colorful and animated with his potent weapons of metaphor and allusion. For example, comparing ants and humans, he writes, “They [ants] farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves … They do everything but watch television.”

Thomas spoke continually about the interdependence of man and microbe, man and animals, and man and earth. He preached humility, calling for humans to realize that they were not dominant but dependent, not commanding fathers but symbiotic sisters. Anticipating the advent of biofeedback and pondering the possibility of human control over their internal autonomic functions, he expressed a lack of confidence in his ability to do the right things. “For I am, to face the facts squarely, considerably less intelligent than my liver,” he writes. He believed in the cleverness of his own physiology more than the suspect wisdom of the human mind.

Some of his playful speculations have come true. In an essay “A Fear of Pheromones,” he jokingly predicted “whole new industries springing up to create new perfumes.” I suspect he would feel delighted and vindicated by the website www.pherlure.com, which advertises “The Only Proven Brand Seen on TV 100% Guaranteed to Attract Sex Now!” He facetiously quips that he objects to having his mitochondria derived from bacteria: “I had never bargained on descent from single cells without nuclei” and, in fact, “have brought them all along with me, or perhaps they have brought me.” Yet he always expanded his vision, explaining that the bacteria-derived mitochondria are in sea gulls and whales and “through them, I am connected; I have close relatives, once removed, all over the place.”

Always the molecular biologist, he saw many things in cellular terms. The sky was “a local roof, a membrane under which we live.” Humans encountering extraterrestrial life would “float out our filaments, extending pili … feeling smaller than ever, as small as a single cell.” For Thomas, cells could speak to life, society, and death.

A victim of the curse “too many books, too little time,” I rarely read books twice. But some writers are so wise that their words always ring true, so eloquent that their sentences always entertain, and so perceptive that new insights spring up with each reading. That is Lewis Thomas, who stretches our mind from the confines of the cell to the infinity of the universe and merits a rethinking even 30 years after he wrote. MM

Charles Meyer is editor in chief of Minnesota Medicine.