Who is Lewis Thomas
Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913 – December 3, 1993) was an American physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher.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. His formative years as an independent medical researcher were at Tulane University School of Medicine.
He was invited to write regular essays in the New England Journal of Medicine. One collection of those essays, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974), won annual National Book Awards in two categories, Arts and Letters and The Sciences (both awards were split)...
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- A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.
- A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.
- I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.
- Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.
- There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain.
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Debbieallmand: the word for the day is paladin. during my lifetime, i witnessed the tireless work by two men who championed two diseases - danny thomas with childhood cancer and jerry lewis with muscular dystrophy. st. jude and the mda make all their research and discoveries public.Mtr_tweets: be our guest with annemarie lewis thomas (the musical theatre academy) take a listen to our great interview via our podcast or youtube channel. podcast:
Danfauchier: visit
Danfauchier: maria popova, reminds us "it is by erring again and again that we find the shape of the path, by tripping again and again that we learn to walk it.” click the link to meet poetic scientist, lewis thomas, as part of maria's recent contribution.
Th29108: worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. it is time to acknowledge this perhaps even to learn to do it better.,lewis thomas,thinking, thought,
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