Thursday, November 21, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Lewis Thomas

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Cells are required to stick precisely to the point. Any ambiguity, any tendency to wander from the matter at hand, will introduce grave hazards for the cells, and even more for the host in which they live. Minor inaccuracies may cause reactions in which neighboring cells are recognized as foreign, and done in. There is a theory that the process of aging may be due to the cumulative effect of imprecision, a gradual degrading of information. It is not a system that allows for deviating.
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"Information"

 
Lewis Thomas

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Richard Heffner: You say "We can create ourselves and our future"
Salk: — by shaping our selves not our cells — thats the important distinction. … We are shaping our cells, but we will not change our selves in the course of shaping our cells.

 
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Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.

 
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A group may have more group information or less group information than its members. A group of non-social animals, temporarily assembled, contains very little group information, even though its members may possess much information as individuals. This is because very little that one member does is noticed by the others and is acted on by them in a way that goes further in the group. On the other hand, the human organism contains vastly more information, in all probability, than does any one of its cells. There is thus no necessary relation in either direction between the amount of racial or tribal or community information and the amount of information available to the individual.

 
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"Have you heard this one, Psycho? How do a blonde's brain cells die? [... A] blonde's brain cells die alone."

 
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