By Lewis Thomas
The medusa is a tiny jellyfish that lives at the ventral floor of a sea slug present in the Bay of Naples. Readers will locate themselves stuck up within the destiny of the medusa and the snail as a metaphor for everlasting problems with existence and loss of life as Lewis Thomas additional extends the exploration of guy and his global started in The Lives of a Cell. one of the treasures during this wonderful publication are essays at the human genius for making error, on illness and normal loss of life, on cloning, on warts, and on Montaigne, in addition to an evaluate of scientific technological know-how and overall healthiness care. In those essays and others, Thomas once more conveys his observations of the clinical international in prose marked through ask yourself and wit.
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Extra info for The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
Example text
If we’re going to have a fight about it, let it be confined to the immediate issue of safety and security, of the recombinants now under consideration, and let us by all means have regulations and guidelines to assure the public safety wherever these are indicated or even suggested. But if it is possible let us stay off that question about limiting human knowledge. It is too loaded, and we’ll simply not be able to cope with it. By this time it will have become clear that I have already taken sides in the matter, and my point of view is entirely prejudiced.
And with a certain amount of splashing and grayish-greenish spray, at all the edges of the pond, up all the banks of ancient New York landfill mud, crawling on their new little feet, out onto the sidewalks, up and down and across the street, into doorways and up the fire escapes, some of them with little suckers on their little feet, up the sides of 47 buildings and into open windows, looking for something, will come the goldfish. It won’t last, of course. Nothing like this ever does. The mayor will come and condemn it in person.
We are not ready for an experiment of this size, nor, I should think, are we 76 willing. For one thing, it would mean replacing today’s world by an entirely identical world to follow immediately, and this means no new, natural, spontaneous, random, chancy children. No children at all, except for the manufactured doubles of those now on the scene. Plus all those identical adults, including all of today’s politicians, all seen double. It is too much to contemplate. Moreover, when the whole experiment is finally finished, fifty years or so from now, how could you get a responsible scientific reading on the outcome?