The lives of a cell

What Hacker News says

1. JoeDaDudeApr 2025
   I'm just going to recommend the biology books written by Lewis Thomas. The books are collections of essays rather than science or text books. They blew my mind and opened up a deep respect for the field of biology and gave me a deep appreciation of life in all its forms, so many of which I didn't know existed.

   Look for:

   The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

   The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

   The Youngest Science

   ...and a couple of thers.

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2. johnthescottOct 2024
   Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas.
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3. xherbertaJun 2017
   "The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internists wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning."

   - Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (Among other achievements, he was dean of Yale Medical School and president of Sloan-Kettering. This collection of essays was published in 1974 and is absolutely prescient and fascinating - he offers profound thoughts on the nature of science, computing, and medicine that have stood the test of time astonishingly well.)

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4. Snail_CommandoDec 2013
   There are already suggestions in this thread that are better than mine, but I'll still throw my hat in the ring.

   That's great that she's interested in biology. I'd like to gently suggest that if she "isn't very enthusiastic about computers or technology", you should instead try to nurture her demonstrated interest in art, biology, and other science.

   I know absolutely nothing about art, except that I apparently have no taste. So I'll refrain from making any suggestions on art books.

   TL;DR: Skip down to the third section for the "technical book" suggestion.

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   (1)

   Here are some suggestions of books on general science, biology, and chemistry (in no particular order, these are some of the first ones that come to my mind):

   "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" By Thomas S. Kuhn

   "The Diversity of Life" By Edward O. Wilson

   "The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time" by Jonathan Weiner

   "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History" by Stephen Jay Gould

   "Life on a Young Planet" By Andrew H. Knoll

   "Galápagos" By Kurt Vonnegut (Fiction, but related) (I loved this book, but it's not for everyone I suppose. A couple of my friends didn't like it.)

   "Napoleon's Buttons" By Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson

   "The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher" By Lewis Thomas

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   (2)

   If she's interested in learning a lot about cellular biology in beautifully exhaustive detail, buy her this textbook:

   "Molecular Biology of the Cell" By Bruce Alberts, Paul Walter, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts

   This book is huge. And it is wonderful.

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   ---Read this suggestion if my other suggestions aren't good---

   (3)

   So you want a technical book? And she's interested in biology?

   Buy her a copy of:

   "The Principles of Biomedical Informatics" By Ira J. Kalet

   This textbook is incredible. It teaches you some fundamentals of many different flavors of bioinformatics. (Different flavors, because, as the author acknowledges, bioinformatics can mean many things.) You can learn how to work with amino acid sequences, protein modeling, medical imaging, probabilistic biomedical models, and more!

   Since you have SICP and LoL on your bookshelf already, you might love the next part. The entire textbook is a cleverly accessible primer on how to build applications with Common Lisp. Whether you're a greybeard Lisp hacker or a repl-noob, you'll like this book if you are interested in learning about bioinformatics.

   I've had the first edition for quite some time. Recently, I think in the past few months, a second edition was released. Someone gifted me the 2nd ed, :) but I haven't really compared the two.

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   I was going to suggest Gödel, Escher, Bach when you mentioned she was interested in art, and were hoping to find a technical book for her. Then I saw that you already had tried that one. I'm going to leave the suggestion anyway because these types of threads are wonderful for finding great books.

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5. jostmeyOct 2012
   An awesome book titled "The lives of a cell" by "Thomas Lewis" delved into the problems of Medicine (among other things) in the later 70s. He was amazingly prescient about the problems that Medicine faces today. He also offered some wonderful solutions for fixing Medicine.
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6. eclipticOct 2012
   "The Lives of a Cell" by Lewis Thomas is a tremendous book, pulling back the curtain on biology. Clear, concise and well written, very similar to Feynman with physics.
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