Lewis Thomas: Thing

Lewis Thomas was American physician, poet and educator. Explore interesting quotes on thing.
Lewis Thomas: 62   quotes 0   likes

“It is when physicians are bogged down by their incomplete technologies, by the innumerable things they are obliged to do in medicine when they lack a clear understanding of disease mechanisms, that the deficiencies of the health-care system are most conspicuous. If I were a policy-maker, interested in saving money for health care over the long haul, I would regard it as an act of high prudence to give high priority to a lot more basic research in biologic science.”

Lewis Thomas book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

"The Technology of Medicine"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Money , Health , Disease , Understanding

“We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time.”

Lewis Thomas book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

"The Long Habit"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Pleasure , Search , Time

“Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms.”

Lewis Thomas

"The Youngest and Brightest Thing Around", p. 13
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Life , Imagination

“The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.”

Lewis Thomas

"On Cloning a Human Being", p. 52
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Behavior , Flowers , Science

“Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.”

Lewis Thomas book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

"Ceti"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Truth , Music

“The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internist’s wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning. Obviously, it is a great time-saver and money-saver for the physician’s family that anxiety about disease is not handled as though it were the disease itself; there is perhaps greater willingness to accept anxiety as a natural, often transient, phenomenon. And certainly there is much less ambition to deploy the full technology of medicine as a corrective for the human condition.”

Lewis Thomas

Source: Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy (1972), p. 3

Money , Marriage , Secret , Disease