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Notes of a Biology Watcher Series

This essay series delves into the intricacies of the natural world with a sense of profound curiosity and humanistic insight. It explores the complex interdependence of all living things, pushing beyond the confines of traditional biological science. The author uses poetic and personal reflections to examine a vast array of subjects, from microbes to human society, revealing hidden connections that bind us all. It celebrates the wonder of existence and our deep place within the universe.

The Lives of a Cell
The Medusa and the Snail

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    The Lives of a Cell

    4.2(9897)Add rating

    Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us."

    The Lives of a Cell
  2. 2

    The Medusa and the Snail

    4.2(62)Add rating

    The medusa is a tiny jellfish that lives on the ventral surface of a sea slug found in the Bay of Naples. Readers will find themselves caught up in the fate of the medusa and the snail as a metaphor for eternal issues of life and death as Lewis Thomas further extends the exploration of a man and his world begun in "The Lives of a Cell." Among the treasures in this magnificent book are essays on the human genius for making mistakes, on disease and natural death, on cloning, on warts, and on Montaigne, as well as an assessment of medical science and health care. In these essays and others, Thomas once again conveys his observations of the scientific world in prose marked by wonder and wit.

    The Medusa and the Snail