The Lives of a Cell
Notes of a Biology Watcher
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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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Lewis Thomas
About this listen
In The Lives of a Cell, Dr. Lewis Thomas opens up to the listener a universe of knowledge and perception that is perhaps not wholly unfamiliar to the research scientist; but the world he explores is also one of men and women, of complex interrelationships, old ironies, peculiar powers, and intricate languages that give identity to the alienated and direction to the dependent. This remarkable work offers a subtle, bold vision of humankind and the world around us - a sense of what gives life - from a writer who seems to draw grace and strength from the very substance of his subject, a man of wit and imagination who takes pleasure in and gives meaning to nearly everything he beholds.
Lewis Thomas was chairman of the Department of Pathology and Dean at Yale Medical School and president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The Lives of a Cell won a National Book Award in 1974.
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Please do an unabridged version!
- By MovieExpertise on 09-29-16
By: Richard Dawkins
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The Cosmic Serpent
- DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
- By: Jeremy Narby
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences", leads the listener through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge. In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.
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Very Good Religious Text
- By Blair K. Hartman on 08-09-17
By: Jeremy Narby
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Population Wars
- A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence
- By: Greg Graffin
- Narrated by: Tom Zingarelli
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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From the very beginning, life on Earth has been defined by war. Today, those first wars continue to be fought around and literally inside us, influencing our individual behavior and that of civilization as a whole. War between populations - whether between different species or between rival groups of humans - is seen as an inevitable part of the evolutionary process. The popular concept of "the survival of the fittest" explains and often excuses these actions.
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Life Changing Book. No other like it.
- By Abraham R. Herrick-Rough on 05-16-16
By: Greg Graffin
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The Gene
- An Intimate History
- By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 19 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The extraordinary Siddhartha Mukherjee has written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
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It's a Wonderful Book
- By JKC on 06-02-16
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
- By: Bill Bryson
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 18 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science. Although he doesn't know anything about the subject (at first), he is eager to learn, and takes information that he gets from the world's leading experts and explains it to us in a way that makes it exciting and relevant.
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The Only Book I reread imediatley after reading
- By Andrew on 11-09-09
By: Bill Bryson
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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13 Things That Don't Make Sense
- The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
- By: Michael Brooks
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Science starts to get interesting when things don't make sense. Science's best-kept secret is that there are experimental results and reliable data that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. If history is any precedent, we should look to today's inexplicable results to forecast the future of science. Michael Brooks heads to the scientific frontier to meet 13 modern-day anomalies and discover tomorrow's breakthroughs.
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10 interesting chapters-read epiloge first
- By Stephen on 06-10-09
By: Michael Brooks
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Biomimicry
- Innovation Inspired by Nature
- By: Janine M. Benyus
- Narrated by: Callie Beaulieu
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Biomimicry is rapidly transforming life on earth. Biomimics study nature's most successful ideas over the past 3.5 million years, and adapt them for human use. The results are revolutionizing how materials are invented and how we compute, heal ourselves, repair the environment, and feed the world. Janine Benyus takes listeners into the lab and in the field with maverick thinkers as they: discover miracle drugs by watching what chimps eat when they're sick; learn how to create by watching spiders weave fibers; and many more examples.
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Dated but good
- By stephen taylor on 09-05-21
By: Janine M. Benyus
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Arrival of the Fittest
- Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle
- By: Andreas Wagner
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In Arrival of the Fittest, renowned evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner draws on over 15 years of research to present the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using experimental and computational technologies that were heretofore unimagined, he has found that adaptations are not just driven by chance, but by a set of laws that allow nature to discover new molecules and mechanisms in a fraction of the time that random variation would take.
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Robustness makes for an interesting life and book
- By Gary on 11-29-14
By: Andreas Wagner
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top notch!
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What listeners say about The Lives of a Cell
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Taveras Hansen
- 06-06-20
Sublime
Magnificent. Straight from mind of an extraordinary human beings to your ears. I cannot imagine any other content that is more enriching and thought provoking.
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- Eric Kasum
- 12-05-22
Amazing
The little and big miracles of our world. I couldn’t stop reading it! This book was recommended to me by a friend. I will get all his other books.
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- Nancy Marx
- 10-07-16
Oldy but goody
Mildly dated but still pretty interesting and relevant. He really goes off on tangents in the last few chapter, especially on the micro minutia of language derivations, which don't have much to do with "lives of a cell". When he sticks to biology and philosophy of biology, much better.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Anthony Robertson
- 05-22-22
I'm Smitten
This is a fantastic representation of the scope of science as it approaches the supernatural.
that asymptote trajectory, the brinkmanship, the audacity. *Chef's Kiss,*. I started this a week after I began listening to a great presentation of the Bhagavad Gita, but I don't think the author would be surprised.
His grasp of language and the evolutionary purpose of storytelling is mind-blowing. If you have a thirsty mind, drink. Listen to this book.
Great choice of narrator, but Grover Gardner always is!
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- Flora
- 03-15-18
So enlightening and enjoyable!
This book had so many more topics related to the cell than simply a discourse on a little unit of physiology.
The author coneyed similarities between a cell as a unit of physiology as well as groups of beings that, as a collective, act as a cell.
I have listened twice and I'll listen again because each time I hear it, my perspectives on life and existence are enhanced.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 04-21-22
Hard to believe this gem was published in 1974
The narration is up to Grover Gardner’s usual high standard. The book is beautifully written and full of amazing observations about our world and it’s inhabitants .Thomas presents his “wholistic” view in twenty eight succinct chapters that are informative
and engaging. The acclaim that greeted this publication in 1974 remains well deserved, this read
is time well spent.
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- wbiro
- 07-02-16
More Interesting as History Now
When I first read this book in the very-early 1980's it was fascinating, and I loved it - it was my first real encounter with the 'we are colonies of cells' perspective (a potentially useful perspective), and I now realize that I probably skipped-over the philosophizing - for I now viewed the author's philosophizing (and there seemed to be a lot of it) as dated, cliche, a bit leftist, and just plain inadequate and weak.
Today, it will probably not be your first encounter with such a bio-mindset, and it may not be your first encounter with bad philosophizing - both being mainstream these days (and the latter dating back to the beginning of humanity), but it should be fascinating from a historical time-capsule standpoint - how people philosophically thought in that era.
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- dan lonergan
- 07-02-24
Good.
This book can sound repetitive at times but this is because the shortness of the chapters makes the author’s favorite topics re-appear in different places. I think the intended purpose is to give the work a ‘main thrust’ in place of a single narrative and it works.
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