Books: The Bug Next Door

THE LIVES OF A CELL

by LEWIS THOMAS

153 pages. Viking. $6.95.

"Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise," Biologist Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell. Thomas' sense of contented dazzlement and his delight in scientific discovery are familiar to readers of his column, "Notes of a Biology Watcher," which appears regularly in the austere New England Journal of Medicine. His book, a collection of some of the best of those pieces, shows those who do not read the Journal how much they have missed.

A physician and teacher who is now president of Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Thomas is also a gifted writer with wit, imagination and a bold, encouraging vision of both man and nature. His main theme is symbiosis, the intimate association between even the most dissimilar organisms. For example, he points out that bacteria called rhizobia live in the roots of bean plants and enable them to utilize the nitrogen in the soil; without these parasites the plants would die. There are also viruses—small, independent packets of nucleic acids —which Thomas believes may have helped man evolve by transmitting bits of the master molecule DNA from one organism to another. Even the single cells that have combined to form a human being house microscopic non-human tenants whose value to the health of the cell appears unquestioned. "My cells are no longer the pure line entities I was raised with," Thomas explains. "They are ecosystems more complex than Jamaica Bay."

Thomas argues elegantly that it is when our bodies forget the importance of living symbolically with other organisms that we contract disease. Most bacteria are not dangerous to man. The man who catches a meningococcus, as the biologist emphasizes, is in considerably less risk of losing his life than the meningococcus unlucky enough to catch a man. It is man's overreaction to many germs, a sort of immunological overkill, that puts him at risk, since his weapons for fighting off bacteria are so powerful that they endanger him as much as they do invaders. Most people, for example, can carry streptococci without any problems. It is only when the body reacts to their presence and produces large numbers of antibodies to fight them that rheumatic fever, which can have numerous adverse effects, results.

The author does not confine his scientist's eye to a microscope. He takes a much wider view of the world, looking at insect behavior and the possibility of intelligent life in outer space or bird songs and the evolution of language. He also offers a modest proposal for saving ourselves from nuclear self-destruction. He suggests that we program into the computers that aim our intercontinental missiles the instruction not to fire until we have acquired complete information about one living thing. He even offers as a candidate for this honor a protozoan called Myxotricha paradoxa, which lives in the innermost reaches of Australian termites' digestive tracts.