Lewis Thomas 1913-93, American physician and biologist, b. Flushing, New York. In his youth he often accompanied his physician father on his rounds and decided early on to be a doctor or a writer. He graduated from Princeton, and obtained his medical degree from Harvard in 1937. He held various professorships and research posts and was dean of the medical schools of New York Univ. (1966-69) and Yale (1972-73). He served as president (1973-80) then chancellor (1980-83) and president emeritus (from 1983) of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He is mostly widely known, however, for his lucid essays that combine his fascination for the living world with his thoughts on biology and philosophy. His collections of his essays include The Lives of a Cell (1974), The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1983).

THOMAS, LEWIS 1913-

Physician-author

Notes of a Biology Watcher

Dr. Lewis Thomas became known to the lay community in 1971 when he began writing, in language accessible to the nonscientific world, a series of essays for the New England Journal of Medicine that he called "Notes of a Biology Watcher." These essays were spotted by Viking Press, and in 1974 twenty-nine of his essays appeared in The Lives of a Cell; Notes of a Biology Watcher. His work received national attention and critical acceptance, and he was awarded a National Book Award in the arts and letters category in 1975. In 1983 he followed his earlier success with The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher.

Renaissance Man

In 1973 Dr. Thomas began heading one of the world's major institutions in the field of cancer research as president and chief executive officer of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. In trying to find a candidate for the job, the trustees looked for a man of Thomas's broad vision and scientific knowledge, rather than a cancer specialist or a professional administrator. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Thomas's medical interests lay in the area of research and new knowledge, and he researched infectious diseases, rheumatic fever, and rheumatic heart disease. He also chaired the Narcotics Advisory Committee of the New York City Health Research Council and was professor and chairman of the pathology departments at Yale University and the New Haven Medical Center. After years of research in experimental pathology, the location of this appointment gave him access to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he began investigating the intricate relationships of defense mechanisms in humans and animals. His house on Cape Cod gave him pleasant weekends to study sea life and gather material for some of the essays that were to make up the book The Lives of a Cell.

A Look at Ourselves

Dr. Thomas's philosophy of humankind's place in the universe is best stated in his opening lines of the title essay in The Lives of a Cell. "We are told," he writes, "that the trouble with Modern Man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature.… 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. But it is an illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia." His renaissance-man curiosity continued to provide him with material for his thought-provoking essays.

Source:

"Bosweli of Organelles," Newsweek (24 June 1974): 89.