Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cannot resist tinkering: "Set cloning aside, and don't try it. Instead go in the other direction. Look for ways to get mutations more quickly, new variety, different songs." Continued genetic errors, after all, enabled the primeval strand of DNA to diversify into the vast spectrum of life. Humans have mimed this sloppy but productive process; "the capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments." With tongue in cheek, Thomas hails the arrival of the computer age; he looks forward to the bigger mistakes that the programming...
Thomas' career had plotted an impressive arc. Though unknown to the general public, he was a successful and esteemed member of the U.S. medical Establishment; he had taught at the right places and run some of them as well. The rest of his life was his to live out in dignified, influential isolation. There was no reason to believe that any work bearing Thomas' name would ever appear on paperback racks in airports or drugstores. But then, as The Medusa and the Snail indicates, there is no reason for expecting many things to happen until they do; only...
Thomas still writes his monthly column, one job among many in his crowded professional life. He is a familiar figure in the halls at Sloan-Kettering, walking quickly, the tall figure canted slightly forward at the waist, his lab coat billowing out behind him, Groucho-style. He is on the run elsewhere as well, making frequent trips to Washington for committee work and to testify at congressional hearings, and to Cambridge, where he serves on the Harvard Board of Overseers. In his laboratory he continues experimenting, currently studying two microbes that lack cell walls and observing how they interact with...
...through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell." Thomas' pyrotechnic conclusion demands the accompaniment of Bach, with the volume turned way up: "No one has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in life can ever be so puzzling. If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs...
...loss of Homeric and Attic Greek from American college life was one of this century's disasters...