Lewis Thomas Quotes - Page 5

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Most of the time I've worked in labs if I didn't encounter something in a week entirely unexpected and surprising I'd consider it a lost week. Lots of that is due to mistakes and stupidity, but it could open a new line of inquiry. Something really good turns up once in a hundred times, but it makes the whole day worthwhile.

Lewis Thomas

Mistake, Stupidity, Encounters

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I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they'd be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today's identical twins.

Lewis Thomas

Odds, Cells, People

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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It is my belief, based partly on personal experience but partly also arrived at by looking around at others, that childhood lasts considerably longer in the males of our species than in the females.

Lewis Thomas

Childhood, Males, Female

"The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher" by Lewis Thomas, (p. 236), 1983.

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The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

Lewis Thomas

Memories, Thinking, Smell

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We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.

Lewis Thomas

Distance, Years, Satisfaction

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.

Lewis Thomas

Dna, Long, Molecules

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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The literature has become too vast to comprehend...It is...difficult to grasp even for workers in closely neighboring fields. ...There is much more reliance on word of mouth for the transmission of scientific data...gossip.

Lewis Thomas

Dark, Data, Gossip

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Some of the shrewdest insight into natural processes have been greeted at the outset by the exclamation 'But that's ridiculous'.

Lewis Thomas

Dark, Age, Ridiculous

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It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

Lewis Thomas

Cells, Resemblance Is, Whales

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The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.

Lewis Thomas

Ignorant, Pieces, Knows

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The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.

Lewis Thomas

Nature, Mean, Science

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.

Lewis Thomas

Development, Stage, Juvenile

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Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

Lewis Thomas

Mean, Persistence, Survival

Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

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Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.

Lewis Thomas

Opportunity, Two, Self

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.

Lewis Thomas

School, College, Attention

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course - often with a great lurch - every few years.

Lewis Thomas

Years, Mind, Experts

Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

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It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.

Lewis Thomas

Hurt, Mean, Science

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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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.

Lewis Thomas

Cells, Diversity, Lightning

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage of my life.

Lewis Thomas

Memories, Science, Simple

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs; the individual termite is a mobile neurone.

Lewis Thomas

Hard Work, Science, Brain

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.

Lewis Thomas

Reading, Mean, Priorities

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The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.

Lewis Thomas

Thinking, Brain, Mind

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.

Lewis Thomas

Running, Knowledge, Science

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It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance.

Lewis Thomas

Ignorance, Knowledge, Science

Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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...the life of the planet began the long, slow process of modulating and regulating the physical conditions of the planet. The oxygen in today's atmosphere is almost entirely the result of photosynthetic living, which had its start with the appearance of blue-green algae among the microorganisms.

Lewis Thomas

Life, Science, Blue

Lewis Thomas (1982). “The Nineteenth Cosmos Club Award, Lewis Thomas, M.D.”

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Born: November 25, 1913
Died: December 3, 1993
Occupation: Physician
Cite this Page: Citation

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