Review
Lewis Thomas -- practicing physician, teacher, Dean, President and Chief Executive of one of the nation’s great hospitals -- began contributing essays to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1971. The first collection, Lives of a Cell, Notes of a Biology Watcher, published in 1974, won the National Book Award. Several more “Biology Watcher” collections followed including: The Medusa and the Snail, and Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. His personal memoir, The Youngest Science, Notes of a Medicine Watcher, was published in 1983, 12 years before his death. Rockefeller University established a prize in his honor to recognize scientists as poets; he was the first recipient. Torsten Wiesel, President of Rockefeller University, wrote that “The Lewis Thomas Prize recognizes the scientist whose voice and vision can tell us of science’s aesthetic and philosophical dimensions, who gives us not merely new information but cause for reflection, even revelation as in a poem or painting.”

I have been rereading Lewis Thomas, picking his short essays randomly from his three "Notes of a Biology Watcher." Biology is the framework of Thomas’s observations, connections, correlations. The parallels to these readings and to listening to great music or looking at great art are striking. Thomas’s writings remain fresh, an experience, a pleasure to read, indeed, to read aloud as my wife and I do. Thomas raises your awareness, makes you think. His insights continue to speak to our times. On rereading I find new understanding.

The essays, written over a dozen or so years, are now more than 25 years old, a generation in human age, generations in scientific age. Yet the essays holds up, seldom dated. Thomas was interested in universals, in how science and medicine is entwined in our lives and our society, and what they tell us about ourselves.

His books on science are Cornerstones. Be stimulated and enjoy.

~ Lee Grodzins, Ph.D., Physicist, Professor Emeritus, MIT