Arts and Letters

When elected in 1984 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Lewis Thomas, M.D., brought two unusual qualifications to his place in the Department of Literature. A writer only in his part time, who published his first book, The Lives of a Cell, at sixty-one, he was one of the most distinguished medical scientists and administrators in America. At various times he was Professor of Pediatric Research at the University of Minnesota, Chairman of the Department of Pathology and Medicine and also Dean at the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center, Chairman of the Pathology Department and Dean at Yale Medical School, and President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The full list of his appointments and honors in Who's Who in America takes up seven inches.

The second of his unusual qualifications as a member of the Department of Literature is that he was a cosmic optimist. He indeed made his reputation as a writer by bringing what Mark Twain called "the damned human race" within the long view of a scientist who had an unusually broad, generous, and witty mind. As it happened, we had the same doctor, for whom Dr. Thomas remained his hero from medical school days even when they disagreed furiously about the right course of treatment for him in old age. It was my doctor who told me how Lewis Thomas was loved and reverenced by other physicians. The one time I met him, he said out of the blue, "Well maybe we have justified ourselves at last by producing Johann Sebastian Bach."

Thomas’s "long view" became clear to the reading public with The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, which was so refreshing because astonishing in the confidence it brought to our place in the creation and thus to the creation itself. It won the National Book Award. In the chapter "Thoughts for a Countdown," Dr. Thomas begins by recalling some of the idiocy that allows us to accept as a law of nature "our century, our attitude toward life, our obsession with disease and death, our human chauvinism,"¹ and then adds:

There are pieces of evidence that we have had it the wrong way round. Most of the associations between the living things we know about are essentially cooperative ones, symbiotic in one degree or another; when they have the look of adversaries, it is usually a standoff relation, with one party issuing signals, warnings, flagging the other off. It takes long intimacy, long and familiar interliving, before one kind of creature can cause illness in another. If there were to be life on the moon, it would have a lonely time waiting for… membership here. We do not have solitary beings. Every creature is, in some sense, connected to and dependent on the rest.²

This theme of symbiosis, which seemed to Dr. Thomas not only the central truth of biological life but a warning to the human race that it could no longer survive without a heightened sense of cooperation, he pursued in all its sometimes astonishing ramifications from the primordial cell to the story of life beginning on earth, taking in as he went everything from the architecture created by termites to the beginnings of music, from the evolution of basic words to the processes of human evolution.

The impression the book made on my grossly unscientific mind was of a man in love with the creation itself, worried about its danger to itself, yet amused, entertained, and above all edified by the lessons in truth and well-being his sense of universal biology had picked up from its extraordinary discoveries in our time. This was a doctor not particularly impressed by the high technology now so visible in medicine, and perhaps more concerned with the shunting off of the dying, the needed recourse in much illness to the body's own wisdom, and the need of a politics based on the common sense of survival instead of the bloodiness that is the first law of nations.

"Nations have themselves become too frightening to think about…,"³ he wrote in his funny, brief chapter on the Iks, formerly nomadic hunters and gatherers in the mountain valleys of northern Uganda, "who have become celebrities, literary symbols for the ultimate fate of disheartened, heartless mankind at large."⁴ The Iks are repellent even to the anthropologists who lived among them for two years because they are detestable in quite special ways. Lewis Thomas's theory about them was that they had

learned to act this way; they copied it, somehow…. The Iks have gone crazy. The solitary Ik, isolated in the ruins of an exploded culture, has built a new defense for himself. If you live in an unworkable society you can make up one of your own, and this is what the Iks have done. Each Ik has become a group, a one-man tribe on his own, a constituency.⁵

Dr. Thomas was not, of course, talking about the performer who demanded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts because she wanted to "explore her sexual identity." His own concern was with the earth and ourselves as part of this earth, with the globe itself as a living breathing organism, with life, blessed life, as something to protect, to foster, to live—as something in ourselves, who alone in our desperate century have the power to hold it up.

1. Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 7.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 110.
4. Ibid., p. 107.
5. Ibid., p. 109.