This is the second collection of essays by Lewis Thomas.His first book, The Lives of a Cell, I translated.In the postscript of that book, there are two paragraphs about the author and the writing process, which are copied here and are still applicable: Here, I think I can add a few words.It is human nature to read his books and want to see him as a human being.However, we will never see Dr. Thomas again.He died earlier in 1994.I have seen two photographs of him, both in his later years, taken just before and after writing this book.One is in the study room, standing with his back against the bookcase, holding the bookcase with both hands, with his head slightly lowered, looking thoughtful.The other one is in the laboratory, wearing a white coat, also with a contemplative expression.He looked like a tall man, well-dressed, and gentlemanly.He mentioned in his autobiography that when he was sixty-six, he injured his knee while surfing on the beach.This shows that he is a man of strong physique.

Next, copy the second paragraph, about the writing process of Lewis Thomas: This is said to be his first book.The book contains twenty-nine articles, and the title of the first article is used as the title. After that, he continued to write, and after four years, he was able to gather again.Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, plus several published elsewhere.For example, in the Journal of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the New York Times, there are still several unpublished articles, and another twenty-nine articles will be published, and the first article will still be used as the book Name, called The Medusa and the Snail, barely translated as.

The translation is clumsy, so I have to add some explanations to make things easier. Medusa is one of the three monsters in Greek legend.Her hair is like snakes.There is a genus of jellyfish with tentacles, like the monster's snake hair, hence the name.What is written in the book is a species of jellyfish in this genus.The Snails here are not those snails that crawl around leisurely on the wet grass with their own little houses on their backs.It's about a marine slug, the nudibranch, which doesn't have a shell.As the title of the article and book, it can only be mentioned briefly, and the result is that people don't know the point.That article was about the symbiotic relationship between a single special species of jellyfish and a single special species of slug in the waters of the Naples Sea.It may have been accidental to start and name the book with this one, but it may well have been deliberate.Because Lewis Thomas has always been concerned with the phenomenon of symbiosis, interdependence and cooperation in nature and human society.Symbiosis and cooperation were among the themes of his first book, and also of this second.

Of course, the subject of this collection of essays is much more than that.In these twenty-nine essays, Thomas talks about life and death, about the world, about hell, about democracy and the social design of freedom, about otters, goldfish and warts, about disease, about thinking, about poetry, about linguistics and punctuation.In his characteristic Thomas way. This free spirit allows Thomas to do one thing no other thinker can: it allows him to leave gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies.Like Montaigne, Thomas took inconsistencies in human temperament, thought, and behavior for granted.He just wrote down with his pen, not caring about any ideological system, and not worrying about making mistakes.He even talked about the importance of making mistakes: the misunderstanding and misuse of words make the evolution of language rich and dynamic; mistakes in the laboratory are the usual way of scientific discovery; wrong result.There are obvious contradictions in his thinking: he does not advocate emphasizing the self, but hates the annihilation of individuality; he ridicules the magic of hypnotism, but reveals a large wilderness of scientific research in a tongue-in-cheek tone; he opposes the limitation of science Research, but hates asexual creation, hates tinkering with the subconscious (you use this name) and autonomous organs.

Thus Thomas has likened his mind to a committee of several selves.When these egos hold meetings, they are often noisy and unresolved.Thomas declared that the committee had no chairman.I don't think this is entirely true.Thomas is a scientist at heart.During his eight hours, when he was a researcher, when he was conducting scientific research and teaching management, when he was a government health official, this scientist was the chairman of the thought committee.Especially when the country's policy on bio-medical scientific research is dangerously skewed, or when fallacies are prevalent in public opinion, this scientist does not hesitate to stand up from his job post.Of course, Thomas was more than a scientist.He praises life, defends life, defends the inherent harmony of life, defends the inviolable human nature, and intervenes in the diseases of social organisms and public psychology—at this time, he surpasses scientists.But he is such a good scientist precisely because he is more than a scientist.His discourse on the process of scientific discovery, on the planning and management of scientific research, on national scientific research policy, on the dilemma of the American health care system, on the social and ethical implications of bio-medical research, and a series of discussions deserve the attention of every scientific researcher. Those who study philosophy and scientific sociology seriously.Both books are there, so I don’t need to elaborate here.Before concluding this small preface, I would like to quote something that Lewis Thomas said on an occasion when he stood up as a scientist. People who know what science is, remind themselves of the motto.

At the end of the 1970s, Americans opposed the abuse of recombinant DNA technology by biologists, fearing that they would combine DNA with Escherichia coli to create dangerous hybrids.The scientists were called "violent," "blasphemy," and "huge" in the worst terms possible.Some have even suggested resorting to administrative and judicial intervention.So, Thomas did his part and made an unambiguous voice: "... Is there some information that causes people to know something that humans still don't know? Is there a forbidden area for scientific exploration? The basis for setting this forbidden area is not whether it can be known, but whether it should be known? Yes Are there some things where we should drop out, stop talking, and rather not acquire some kind of knowledge, lest we or anyone else do something with that knowledge? My personal answer is a straight 'no.'"

"It is very difficult to predict what science will produce. If it is a really promising science, it is impossible to predict it. This is determined by the nature of science. If you want to discover Something really new is by definition not known in advance, so there's no way to predict where a really new line of research will lead. You don't have a choice in the matter, you can't choose what you think you're going to like, and Shut down the cues that might cause discomfort. You either have science or you don't. But when you have science, you have to accept slices of surprising, surprising Disturbing messages, even ones that overwhelm and turn things upside down. That's how it is."

Li Shaoming