The curation of symbolic immortality

Jay Walker is the curator of TEDMED and he shared some historically significant books from his library.

This was the warm up for our fireside chat on the Longevity Prize (to be announced), the brain child of Joon Yun who has spent the past decade formulating a grand unifying theory of aging, whereby the myriad symptoms (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, pattern baldness, inflammation) are derivative of one root cause — the modern maladaptation of the sympathetic nervous system (the “fight or flight” response optimized within primitive hunting societies).

Here, Jay is showing us Micrographia, the first scientific best seller, and a selection from the 1665 section of his library (another example).

In Micrographia, Hooke brought a new perspective to the world. He used the novel tool of the microscope to examine the inner world all around us, exposing never before seen images of the flea (the centerfold above), louse, gnat and compound eye of a fly.

We may take the marvel of photography and the internet for granted these days. To capture and share what one saw through the microscope, or telescope, took painstaking effort, was prone to error (think of the canali on Mars), and expensive to distribute. Hooke took meticulous sketches of what he saw, which then had to be converted into engraving plates for publishing.

When Hooke looked at cork and plant leaves, he saw a peculiar similarity in the micro world (image below). There were rows and rows of similar looking boxes. He compared them to the rows of dormitory cells in a nunnery, and the word “cell” has been used ever since in the vernacular of biology.