The Youngest Science Quotes

“It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage in my life.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science

“Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea -- the kind of idea that looks, as it approaches, like the explanation for everything about everything -- tends to hover near at hand when you are thinking hard about something quite different? There you are, halfway into a taxi, thinking about the condition of the cartilage in the right knee joint, and suddenly, with a whirring sound, in flies a new notion looking for a place to light. You'd better be sure you have a few bare spots, denuded of anything like thought, ready for its perching, or it will fly away into the dark.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science

“A good university doesn’t need to be headed as much as to be given its head, and it is the administrator’s task—not at all an easy one—to see that this happens. The temptations to intervene from the top, to reach in and try to change the way the place works, to arrive at one’s desk each morning with one’s mind filled with exhilarating ideas for revitalizing the whole institution, are temptations of the devil and need resisting with all the strength of the administrator’s character.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher

“I still have my notebooks with those experiments, unexplainable and unpublishable, reminding me that things tend always to go wrong in research. If I had been less confident and more cautious at the time, before leaving Guam I would have taken pains to bring home some of the Guam rabbits, or at least some samples of frozen heart tissue, but I didn’t; I was so sure that the experiments meant what I wanted them to mean that it never once occurred to me that I might not be able to get the same results in New York. I had all the controls I needed; I wasn’t bright enough to realize that Guam itself might be a control.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher

“Nevertheless, on balance the immune system works very well, so well indeed that the neurobiologists are currently entertaining (and being entertained by) the same selection theory to explain how the brain works. It is postulated that the thinking units equivalent to lymphocytes are the tiny columns of packed neurones which make up most of the substance of the cerebral cortex. These clusters are the receptors, prepared in advance for confrontation with this or that sensory stimulus, or this or that particular idea. For all the things we will ever see in the universe, including things not yet thought of, the human brain possesses one or another prepared, aware, knowledgeable cluster of connected neurones, as ready to lock on to that one idea as a frog’s brain is for the movement of a fly. The recognition is amplified by synaptic alterations within the column of cells and among the other groups with which the column is connected, and memory is installed. Statistically, the probability that any theory like this one, very early in its development, will turn out to be correct is of course vanishingly small, even with the speculative backing of an analogous mechanism in the immune system. The great thing about it, right or wrong, is that it is already causing ripples of interest and excitement, and other investigators are starting to plan experiments, cooking up ideas, their minds wandering, their receptors displayed at full attention, waiting for the right idea to come along. Neurology and immunology may be on the verge of converging.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher

“Patients with high fevers were sponged with cold alcohol at frequent intervals. The late-evening back rub was the rite of passage into sleep.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher

“I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science