“우리가 가까운 거리를 찾아갈 땐 과학자에게 의지하지만, 멀리 있는 미래로 갈 땐 시인에게 의지한다.”
루이스 토마스상, Lewis Thomas Prize
The Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, named for its first recipient, Lewis Thomas, is an annual literary prize awarded by The Rockefeller University to scientists or physicians deemed to have accomplished a significant literary achievement; it recognizes "scientists as poets." Originally called the Lewis Thomas Prize for the Scientist as Poet, the award was first given in 1993. Recipients' writings bridge the gap between the laboratory and the wider world, in the spirit of Lewis Thomas' collection of essays The Lives of a Cell.
The prize-giving ceremony is usually in the form of a lecture; winners receive a medal, a citation, and a cash award.
Subsequent recipients of the prize, awarded first for the year 1993 to Thomas, have been:
François Jacob (for 1994)
Abraham Pais (for 1995)
Freeman Dyson (for 1996)
Max Perutz (for 1997)
Ernst Mayr (for 1998)
Steven Weinberg (for 1999)
E. O. Wilson (for 2000)
Oliver Sacks (for 2001)
Jared Diamond (for 2002)
Richard Fortey (for 2003)
Jean-Pierre Changeux (for 2004)
Thomas Eisner (for 2005)
Richard Dawkins (for 2006)
James D. Watson (for 2007)
Robert Sapolsky (for 2008)
Martin Rees (for 2009)
Kay Redfield Jamison (2012)
Frances Ashcroft (2013)
Atul Gawande (2014)
Ian Stewart and Steven Strogatz (2015)
Sean B Carroll (2016)
Sylvia Earle (2017)
Kip Thorne (2018)
Siddhartha Mukherjee (2019)
Richard Prum (2021)
Jennifer L. Eberhardt (2022)
Suzanne Simard (2023)
루이스 토마스상은 ‘시인의 경지에 이른 과학자(The Scientist as Poet)’에게 수여하는 국제적 상이다. 과학과 문학 사이에 다리를 놓아 이어준 과학자면서 동시에 작가인 보기 드문 인물에게 매년 수여한다. 1993년 록펠러 대학교에서 제정하여 첫 번째 수상자인 루이스 토마스의 이름을 따서 상명을 지었다.
루이스 토마스의 아버지는 개원 의사였고, 간호사 출신인 어머니는 아버지의 진료를 도왔다. 하버드 의대생 시절 문학적 야망을 보였고, 여러 편의 시를 발표하기도 했다. 호중구가 박테리아 속 독소 또는 항원-항체 반응에 의해 유발되는 열과 쇼크의 중요한 매개체임을 발견한 면역 병리학의 선구자였다. 예일대와 뉴욕대 의대 학장, 슬로안-케터링 암센터 회장을 역임했다. 《뉴잉글랜드 의학 잡지(New England Journal of Medicine)》에 <생물학 관찰자의 노트>라는 정기 칼럼을 기고하여, ‘생물학의 광범위한 주제에 관해 명쾌한 명상과 성찰을 담고 있다’는 평가를 받았다. 연재 글 중 일부는 단행본 『세포의 삶(The Lives of a Cell)』(1974)으로 발간되어 전국 도서상(National Book Award)을 수상하였다. 책은 ‘현대인이 가진 문제는 자연으로부터 자신을 분리하려고 애쓰고 있다는 점이다.’라는 문장으로 시작한다. ‘시인의 경지에 이른 과학자상’을 수상한 1993년, 그해 12월 여든 해의 삶을 마감했다.
‘시인의 경지에 이른 과학자의 목소리와 비전은 다른 사람에게 새로운 정보를 제공할 뿐만 아니라, 과학의 미학적이고 철학적 영감을 주어 뜻밖의 사실을 깨우치게 한다.’
Organelles as Organisms
We seem to be living through the biologic revolution, so far anyway, without being upheaved or even much disturbed by it. Even without being entirely clear about lust what it is, we are all learning to take it for granted. It is a curious, peaceful sort of revolution, in which there is no general apprehension that old views are being outraged and overturned. Instead, whole, great new blocks of information are being brought in almost daily and put precisely down in what were previously empty spaces. The news about DNA and the genetic code did not displace an earlier dogma; there was nothing much there to be moved aside. Molecular biology did not drive out older, fixed views about the intimate details of cell function. We seem to be starting at the beginning, from scratch.
We not only take it for granted--we tend to talk about the biologic revolution as though expecting to make profits from it, rather like a version of last century's industrial revolution. All sorts of revolutionary changes in technology are postulated for the future, ranging from final control of human disease to solutions of the world food and population problems. We are even beginning to argue about which futures we like and which we prefer to cancel. Questions about the merits of generic engineering, the cloning of desirable human beings from single cells, and even, I suppose, the possibility that two heads might actually be better than one, are already being debated at seminars.
So far, we don't seem to have been really shocked by anything among the items of new knowledge. There is surprise, even astonishment, but not yet dismay. Perhaps it is still too early to expect this, and it may lie just ahead.
It is not too early to begin looking for trouble. I can sense some, for myself anyway, in what is being learned about organelles. I was raised in the belief that these were obscure little engines inside my cells, owned and operated by me or my cellular delegates, private, submicroscopic bits of my intelligent flesh. Now, it appears, some of them, and the most important ones at that, are total strangers.
The evidence is strong, and direct. The membranes lining the inner compartment of mitochondria are unlike other animal cell membranes, and resemble most closely the membranes of bacteria. The DNA of mitochondria is qualitatively different from the DNA of animal cell nuclei and strikingly similar to bacterial DNA; moreover, like microbial DNA, it is closely associated with membranes. The RNA of mitochondria matches the organelles' DNA, but not that of the nucleus. The ribosomes inside the mitochondria are similar to bacterial ribosomes, and different from animal ribosomes. The mitochondria do not arise denovo in cells; they are always there, replicating on their own, independently of the replication of the cell. They travel down from egg to newborn; a few come in with the sperm, but most are maternal passengers. The chloroplasts in all plants are, similarly, independent and self-replicating lodgers, with their own DNA and RNA and ribosomes. In structure and pigment content they are the images of prokaryotic blue-green algae. It has recently been reported that the nucleic acid of chloroplasts is, in fact, homologous with that of certain photosynthetic micro- organisms.
There may be more. It has been suggested that flagellae and cilia were once spirochetes that joined up with the other prokaryotes when nucleated cells were being pieced together. The centrioles and basal bodies are believed in some quarters to be semiautonomous organisms with their own separate genomes. Perhaps there are others, still unrecognized.
I only hope I can retain title to my nuclei.
It is surprising that we take information like this so calmly, as though it fitted in nicely with notions we've had all along. Actually, the suggestion that chloroplasts and mitochondria might be endosymbionts was made as long ago as 1885, but one might expect, nevertheless, that confirmation of the suggestion would have sent the investigators out into the streets, hallooing. But this is a sober, industrious field, and the work goes on methodically, with special interest just now in the molecular genetics of organelles. There is careful, restrained speculation on how they got there in the first place, with a consensus that they were probably engulfed by larger cells more than a billion years ago and have simply stayed there ever since.
The usual way of looking at them is as enslaved creatures, captured to supply ATP for cells unable to respire on their own, of to provide carbohydrate and oxygen for cells unequipped for photosynthesis. This master-slave arrangement is the common view of full-grown biologists, eukaryotes all. But there is the other side. From their own standpoint, the organelles might be
viewed as having learned early how to have the best of possible worlds, with least effort and risk to themselves and their progeny. Instead of evolving as we have done, manufacturing longer and elaborately longer strands of DNA, and running ever-increasing risks of mutating into evolutionary cul-de-sacs, they elected to stay small and stick to one line of work. To accomplish this, and to assure themselves the longest possible run, they got themselves inside all the rest of us.
It is a good thing for the entire enterprise that mitochondria and chloroplasts have remained small, conservative, and stable, since these two organelles are, in a fundamental sense, the most important living things on earth. Between them they produce the oxygen and arrange for its use. In effect, they run the place. My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I sup- pose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.
I am intimately involved, and obliged to do a great deal of essential work for my mitochondria. My nuclei code out the outer membranes of each, and a good many of the enzymes attached to the cristae must be synthesized by me. Each of them, by all accounts, makes only enough of its own materials to get along on, and the rest must come from me. And I am the one who has to do the worrying.
Now that I know about the situation, I can find all kinds of things to worry about. Viruses, for example. If my organelles are really symbiotic bacteria, colonizing me, what's to prevent them from catching a virus, or if they have such a thing as lysogeny, from conveying a phage to other organelles? Then there is the question of my estate. Do my mitochondria all die with me, or did my children get some of mine along with their mother's; this sort of thing should not worry me, I know, but it does.
Finally, there is the whole question of my identity, and, more than that, my human dignity. I did not mind it when I first learned of my descent from lower forms of life. I had in mind an arboreal family of beetle-browed, speechless, hairy submen, ape- like, and I've never objected to them as forebears. Indeed, being Welsh, I feel the better for it, having clearly risen above them in my time of evolution. It is a source of satisfaction to be part of the improvement of the species. But not these things. I had never bargained on descent from single cells without nuclei. I could even make my peace with that, if it were all, but there is the additional humiliation that I have not, in a real sense, descended at all. I have brought them all along with me, or perhaps they have brought me.
It is no good standing on dignity in a situation like this, and better not to try. It is a mystery. There they are, moving about in my cytoplasm, breathing for my own flesh, but strangers. They are much less closely related to me than to each other and to the free-living bacteria out under the hill. They feel like strangers, but the thought comes that the same creatures, precisely the same, are out there in the cells of sea gulls, and whales, and dune grass, and seaweed, and hermit crabs, and further inland in the leaves of the beech in my backyard, and in the family of skunks beneath the back fence, and even in that fly on the window. Through them, I am connected; I have close relatives, once re- moved, all over the place. This is a new kind of information, for me, and I regret somewhat that I cannot be in closer touch with my mitochondria. If I concentrate, I can imagine that I feel them; they do not quite squirm, but there is, from time to time, a kind of tingle. I cannot help thinking that if only I knew more about them, and how they maintain our synchrony, I would have a new way to explain music to myself.
There is something intrinsically good-natured about all symbiotic relations, necessarily, but this one, which is probably the most ancient and most firmly established of all, seems especially equable. There is nothing resembling predation, and no pretense of an adversary stance on either side. If you were looking for something like natural law to take the place of the "social Darwinism" of a century ago, you would have a hard time drawing lessons from the sense of life alluded to by chloroplasts and mitochondria, but there it is.