Lewis Thomas was born in 1913 in Flushing, New York to a family physician and his nurse wife. He was fascinated by his father's profession, and it became a baseline for his later understanding of the dramatic changes, not always good ones in his opinion, in the practice of medicine in the twentieth century. He entered Princeton at 15 where he was an average student, but he developed an interest in poetry and literary humor, writing much 'good bad verse,' as he described it, for the Princeton Tiger, which showed primarily his sense of humor about undergraduate life but no particular interest in the natural world. He was admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1933, at the time when medicine was changing dramatically into a clinical science and antibiotics would soon be developed. During his internship at Boston City Hospital he supported himself by donating blood and publishing a dozen poems in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, and the Saturday Evening Post.【71】He completed a residency in neurology at the Columbia Presbyterian Medieal Center and married Beryl Dawson, whom he later called his editorial collaborator, in 1941. He began his medical career as research fellow in neurology at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratories. He was called for service in 1942 with the Naval Reserve as a medical researcher assigned to the Pacific.【72】His developing interest in immunological defense mechanisms became the base of his later research; he would later write a long essay on it, 'On Disease,' in The Medusa and the Snail. In 1948 Thomas went to Tulane University as a researcher in microbiology and immunology. He was noted for his creativity and ability to generate original hypotheses.【73】He became head of the pathology department at New York University Medical School in 1954, where over the next fifteen years he helped transform. immunology into a clinical science and built unusually collaborative and interdisciplinary research teams. He would also chair the Department of Medicine at Bellevue Hospital.【74】However, he never abandoned his clinical and research concerns, and moved to Yale in 1969 to continue research in the pathogenesis of mycoplasma diseases. In 1971, while Thomas was chairman of the Department of Pathology at the Yale Medical School, his friend Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, the editor Of the New England Journal of Medicine, asked him to write a monthly essay, called 'Notes of a Biology Watcher.' Each essay would be about 1,000 words, firing a page of the Journal; there would be no pay, but there would also be no editing of his work.【75】