In the canon
The Lives of a Cell
- Form
- Form Essay Collection
- Year
- Year 1974
- Pages
- Pages 180
Lewis Thomas, a physician who spent his working life among microscopes and dying patients, set out to think about the mitochondria in his own cells and arrived somewhere vertiginous: they are not his. They descend from free-living bacteria that moved in ages ago and never left, carrying their own DNA, breathing on his behalf, so that he is less a single self than a crowded arrangement, a colony that learned to walk.
It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the Sun.
The blurb, the gist, the why of the day and the work itself are in the app. The first button needs it on this device; the second gets it there.