The Lives of a Cell

Lewis Thomas, in his book The Lives of a Cell, approaches biology with the same sort of worldly context as we have in Biology 103. He recounts and observes in a tone both lighthearted and down to earth. In the collection of essays that composes this book, he does a fantastic job of reminding the reader of how life might be viewed and lived from different scales and through the eyes (or other senses, to be fair) of other animals. This has given me a lot to think about in terms of defining life, a definition we wrestled with throughout our class.

For example, Thomas describes some animals, particularly insects, as functioning only when together as a single organism, explaining that “There really is no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.” (54). How are we to change our definition of life is when it is pointed out that the circuits of ants covering anthills “are so intimately woven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism” (54)?

In our biology class I have noticed that web papers were almost exclusively about the biological phenomena of human beings, topics ranging from music to swearing to rampaging to eating to love. Learning about Thomas’ accounts of other organisms provided me with a broader view of life on Earth and insights into human subtleties that studying human beings alone could not provide. The fact that the world is unconsciously organized is what makes life on Earth so fascinating to study, and makes humans so unique. We put a gross amount of effort into our own upkeep (many of us do, anyway), from meticulously choosing the clothing we wear to the friends we make to staunchly preventing death for as long as possible.

Perhaps we do not have to try so hard to keep ourselves in one piece; however, it is this picky part of humans that makes us unique. Some aspect of our perception has enabled human desire to build incredibly elegant, complicated wants beyond our basic needs, such as wanting to write a story, or to create this specific piece of art with this specific medium. Our appetite for specific things drives us to make choices, which have helped us accomplish unprecedented behaviors, but also get us in trouble.

Lewis Thomas also touches on human consciousness and our attitudes toward death, which we addressed in several class discussions. Specifically, we talked about some controversies in health care pertaining to several recent separate scientific studies that encourage doctors and patients to only start mammograms at fifty, and to do them only every other year. The class was fairly split—about half of the students felt that this would be a good measure, saving a lot of money that could be more efficiently spent, while the other students (usually these students had had some sort of close experience with cancer, I discovered at the end of the discussion) believed it would be unfair to be one of the few women who could have been saved by more vigorous screening. But what of the costs of providing the means for screening? Or the costs of any other kind of healthcare, for that matter (an “80-odd billion it is said to cost the nation” in the 1970s (31))? Thomas writes, in a chapter about the technology of medicine,

 

Thomas was born in 1913 and wrote these essays in the 1960s or 70s. Little has changed in the last forty years. He quotes Thomas Browne in a later chapter: “The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.” (47). Lewis Thomas aptly continues, “These days, the habit [of living] has become an addiction: we are hooked on living…” (48). This human tendency to fear death so fiercely is intriguing to me. Thomas explains the stories of several people who have “died” before, or at least who began to, to try to ameliorate evasive human attitudes toward death. Such people report “peace, calm, and total painlessness,” “tranquility,” and feeling strange that “so many people were rushing around … moving urgently, handling his body with such excitement, while all his awareness was of quietude.” (51). Perhaps there is little to fear, unless of course, as someone in our class suggested, fear drives love of life itself.

This book touches on several other things that really connect to our class, including the concept of improbability, which I was really taken with: “We violate probability, by our nature. To be able to do this systematically, and in such wild varieties of form, from viruses to whales, is extremely unlikely; to have sustained the effort successfully for the several billion years of our existence, without drifting back into randomness, was nearly a mathematical impossibility.” (141). I enjoyed this book very much. It reinforced some essential lessons and ways of thinking I learned in Biology 103 that I will keep with me for as long as I am improbably assembled.

And lastly, to reinforce that science is a loopy process, it is appropriate to end my paper with this quotation:

“It is nice to think that that there are so many unsolved puzzles ahead for biology, although I wonder whether we will ever find enough graduate students.” (41).