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阅读刘易斯·托马斯 Lewis Thomas在百家争鸣的作品!!! |
刘易斯·托马斯 - 人生经历
刘易斯·托马斯博士是美国杰出的医学家和教育家。他出身于美国纽约的一个医生家庭，就读于普林斯顿大学和哈佛医学院，曾经在许多著名的大学医院行医，主持研究和领导教学工作。
刘易斯·托马斯历任明尼苏达大学儿科研究所教授、纽约大学——贝尔维尤医疗中心病理学系和内科学系主任、耶鲁医学院病理学系主任、纽约市斯隆—凯特林癌症纪念中心（研究院）院长，并荣任美国科学院院士。
他亲身经历了本世纪医学的重要发展时期，做出过许多创造性业绩。他的阅历丰富，学识渊博，思想深邃。和许多优秀的科学家一样，托马斯的兴趣广泛，关心社会和人类的命运，并且爱好音乐，长于诗文。
1970 年代初，他应美国最负盛名的医学刊物《新英格兰医学杂志》(New England Journal of Medicine)主编之约，为该刊撰写专栏文章，笔触所及纵情宇宙万物，讴歌生命、大自然和人类的科学事业；对医疗技术和保健体制的论述鞭辟入里，富有远见。这些寓意深刻、情理交融、文笔清新的科学随笔，后来集成《细胞生命的礼赞》和《水母与蜗牛》；中文译本近年由湖南科技出版社纳入“第一推动丛书”出版。
刘易斯·托马斯的名字在美国家喻户晓，他并非文学大师，而是—位杰出的科普作家。作者实际上是以《细胞生命的礼赞》和《水母与蜗牛》而著名的，这两本书都是他在new england journal of medicine和nature上写的随笔。他的《细胞生命的礼赞》一书是一个医学家、生物学家关于生命、人生、社会乃至宇南的思考，内容博大而深邃，阅读这样的作品，将是一次最具启发性的跨时空的知识思辨之旅。
刘易斯·托马斯 - 名言
如果没有人向我们提供失败的教训，我们将一事无成。我们思考的轨道是在正确和错误之间二者择一，而且错误的选择和正确的选择的频率相等。
如果没有人向我们提供失败的教训，我们将一事无成。我们思考的轨道是在正确和错误之间二者择一，而且错误的选择和正确的选择的频率相等。
如果没有人向我们提供失败的教训，我们将一事无成。我们思考的轨道是在正确和错误之间二者择一，而且错误的选择和正确的选择的频率相等。
Thomas was born in Flushing, New York and attended Princeton University and Harvard Medical School. He became Dean of Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute.
He was invited to write regular essays in the New England Journal of Medicine, and won a National Book Award for the 1974 collection of those essays, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. He also won a Christopher Award for this book. Two other collections of essays (from NEJM and other sources) are The Medusa and the Snail and Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. His autobiography, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher is a record of a century of medicine and the changes which occurred in it. He also published a book on etymology entitled Et Cetera, Et Cetera, poems, and numerous scientific papers.
Many of his essays discuss relationships among ideas or concepts using etymology as a starting point. Others concern the cultural implications of scientific discoveries and the growing awareness of ecology. In his essay on Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Thomas addresses the anxieties produced by the development of nuclear weapons. Thomas is often quoted, given his notably eclectic interests and superlative prose style.
The Lewis Thomas Prize is awarded annually by The Rockefeller University to a scientist for artistic achievement.
Parallels to Gaia Theory
In the book The Lives of a Cell, Thomas makes an observation very similar to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis:
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.
On Probability and Possibility
In 1974, Thomas wrote in The Lives of a Cell that the function of humans is communication.
"We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion."
Thirty-some years later, with the developments in communication such as the Internet and all its derivatives (newsgroups, email, websites), the import of these words takes on a whole new meaning.
"Or perhaps we are only at the beginning of learning to use the system, with almost all our evolution as a species still ahead of us. Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind...are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later, analogous to the prokaryotic cells that drifted through shallow pools in the early days of biological evolution. Later, when the time is right, there may be fusion and symbiosis among the bits, and then we will see eukaryotic thought, metazoans of thought, huge interliving coral shoals of thought.
The mechanism is there [n.b.: in the human brain], and there is no doubt that it is already capable of functioning...
We are simultaneously participants and bystanders, which is a puzzling role to play. As participants, we have no choice in the matter; this is what we do as a species."
Book
* The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1974, Viking Press: ISBN 0-670-43442-6, Penguin Books, 1995 reprint: ISBN 0-14-004743-3
* The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1979, Viking Press: ISBN 0-670-46568-2, Penguin Books, 1995 reprint: ISBN 0-14-024319-4
* Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony, 1983, Viking Press: ISBN 0-670-70390-7, Penguin Books, 1995 reprint: ISBN 0-14-024328-3
* The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher, 1983, Viking: ISBN 0-670-79533-X, Penguin Books, 1995 reprint: ISBN 0-14-024327-5
* Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word-Watcher, 1990. Little Brown & Co ISBN 0-316-84099-8, Welcome Rain, 2000 ISBN 1-56649-166-5
* The Fragile Species, 1992, Scribner, ISBN 0-684-19420-1, Simon & Schuster, 1996 paperback: ISBN 0-684-84302-1