The Lives of a Cell – Lewis Thomas

In Lewis Thomas’s essay, The Lives of a Cell, he describes a cell, pointing out the different organelles and their purposes, as well as the history of how they came to be in the eukaryotic cell. He presents the endosymbiosis theory and explains how the eukaryotic cell was formed with those migrant prokaryocytes. However, Thomas takes this idea of a cell and compares it to the earth. Lewis Thomas had this essay published in 1971 in The New England Journal of Medicine, and during that time, the cell was still being defined. His view of comparing our world to a cell—something so massive on a macroscopic scale to something so small on a microscopic scale—was a very big leap. However, Thomas was fully aware of the step he took. Educated at Princeton and Harvard Medical School, he rose to become a professor of pathology at both New York University and Yale University. There is no doubt that he intended on comparing Earth to a cell. 

His entire essay is essentially one extended metaphor. Thomas means to simplify our works on Earth to the minute works within a tiny cell and its surroundings. Our grand advancements in technology are like the viruses spreading DNA from cell to cell; information known by our ancestors has been passed down, generation through generation, just like how DNA is received from parent cells. Thomas shows mankind that the world that we live in is just like the cells within our own bodies. He wrote to inform us that no matter what we do to separate ourselves from nature, “Man is embedded in nature” (Thomas 358). Thomas accomplished this purpose as he had provided the reader with facts about the cell and how everything is connected within the cell just as we are connected with nature on Earth.

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/neuron-galaxy.jpg