Doubts

By R.Z. Sheppard

LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS ON LISTENING TO MAHLER'S NINTH SYMPHONY

By Lewis Thomas Viking; 168 pages; $12.95

Dr. Lewis Thomas, 69, has built a successful second career by giving many laymen their first clear overview of the moral and even aesthetic problems that can be encountered in the laboratory. The bestselling essays in The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail moved nimbly from the microscopic to the transcendental. Nucleoli revealed worlds of meaning; peptides hid oceans of being. Charmed by Thomas' low-key lyricism, the judges of the National Book Award granted the physician-researcher its prize for arts and letters in 1975. Somehow the doctor had put his pulse on the thumb of the nation.

Late Night Thoughts finds him as steady as ever. He has much to add to his recurrent themes: the wonder of discovery and the need for humility when faced with nature's endless secrets. "It is not just that there is more to do," he writes, "there is everything to do." Urgent notes are struck, especially in the title piece. The final strains of Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony no longer evoke a musical metaphor for death's natural release. The long string passage now stirs images of the world's end. The reason for the change is that the sage has been caught up in the nuclear arms debate: "Words like disaster and catastrophe are too frivolous for the events that would inevitably follow a war with thermonuclear weapons... The preparations go on, the dreamlike rituals are rehearsed, and the whole earth is being set up as an altar for a burnt offering."

Dramatic pessimism does not come naturally to Thomas. He is a self-acknowledged meliorist, one who believes that change is for the better and people can accelerate the beneficial process. He proposes that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. exchange hundreds of thousands of guest-hostages in the hope that neither side would send missiles to kill its own people. But why travel? The technology of nuclear action and reaction has already made everyone hostage in his own bed.

Thomas' plan has a low probability; scientists rarely speak of absolute impossibilities. One of the author's keenest pleasures is describing phenomena that should not occur: a species of bacteria that thrives on temperatures of more than 300DEG C or a type of virus that propagates vigorously even though it does not contain any detectable genetic material.

Nature has many ways of saying "Do not understand me too quickly," and Thomas is constantly watchful for the exception that disproves the rule. Both as scientist and humanist, he finds that doubt is his most reliable ally. Bewilderment, as he also calls it, is the 20th century's family secret: "Hidden in the darkest closets of all our institutions of higher learning, repressed whenever it seems to be emerging into public view, sometimes glimpsed staring from attic windows like a mad cousin of learning."

Certainty's embarrassing kin guides Thomas past accepted wisdom to good sense and imaginative speculation. He studies quantum mechanics and realizes that it holds no mystic truths or fetching metaphors for him because he does not know the mathematics. Elsewhere, he bucks psychiatric doctrine and formulates a hands-off policy toward the unconscious: "It cannot be a bad thing to own one, but I would no more think of meddling with it than trying to exorcise my liver, an equally mysterious apparatus. Until we know a lot more, it would be wise, as we have learned from other fields in medicine, to let them be." Doubt, as the doctor gracefully demonstrates, is another way of knowing. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.