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Lewis Thomas

(25 Nov 1913 - 3 Dec 1993)

American physician and author best known for his reflective essays on a wide range of topics in biology.

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

— Lewis Thomas

In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony(1984), 143.

It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.

— Lewis Thomas

It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.

— Lewis Thomas

In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony(1984), 209.

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. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

— Lewis Thomas

In 'On Probability and Possibility', The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974), 165.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

— Lewis Thomas

In The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979), 51.

The great secret, known to internists…, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.

— Lewis Thomas

In 'Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy', The New England Journal of Medicine (12 Oct 1972), 3. Also published as Occasional Paper of the Institute of Medicine.

The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. We are only now beginning to appreciate how strange and splendid it is, how it catches the breath, the loveliest object afloat around the sun, enclosed in its own blue bubble of atmosphere, manufacturing and breathing its own oxygen, fixing its own nitrogen from the air into its own soil, generating its own weather at the surface of its rain forests, constructing its own carapace from living parts: chalk cliffs, coral reefs, old fossils from earlier forms of life now covered by layers of new life meshed together around the globe, Troy upon Troy.

— Lewis Thomas

In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1984), 22-23.

The uniformity of the earth’s life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.

— Lewis Thomas

In The Lives of a Cell (1974), 5.

We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language… We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a “common goal” for all of nature as I can guess at.

— Lewis Thomas

In The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974, 1995), 16-17.