Thomas, Lewis (1913–93)

Born in 1913 in New York, Lewis Thomas's father was a physician and his mother was a nurse. Thomas became well known for his research on immunology and receives credit for turning it into a scientific discipline. He is perhaps better known for his engaging style of writing in his essays and books that made scientific learning accessible to the masses.

Intrigued by the medical profession at a young age, Thomas was accepted into Princeton at the age of 15, where he enjoyed writing poetry. Accepted into Har-vard's Medical School in 1933, he graduated in 1937 and interned at Boston City Hospital, selling blood for cash and poems to the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, and the Saturday Evening Post.

After completing a neurology residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, he married Beryl Dawson in 1941. The following year, he was called up by the Navy Reserve and began working as a medical researcher in the Pacific. After the war ended, he practiced pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, where he began researching rheumatic fever.

In 1948, Thomas worked as a researcher at Tulane University. Two years later, he moved to the University of Minnesota to continue his work on rheumatic fever. In 1954, he was named head of pathology at the New York University Medical School; this was where his immunology work came to the forefront. He stayed there until 1969, when he moved to Yale University. In 1973, he was named president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York, focusing on cancer research.

In 1971, Thomas began writing a monthly essay called “Notes of a Biology Watcher” for the New England Journal of Medicine. From the 1970s until the 1990s, Thomas published a number of books, starting with The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher in 1974, which sold 1.5 million copies and won the National Book Award. His topics were generally scientific in nature, focusing on microbiology and immunology, but they also contained meditations on nature. In 1986, Princeton opened its Lewis Thomas Laboratory. Thomas died in December 1993 of a rare blood disorder called Waldenstrom's disease.