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There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other, return to earlier arrangements, get along, whenever possible.... Any cell - man, animal, fish, fowl, or insect - given the chance and under the right conditions, brought into contact with any other cell, however foreign, will fuse with it. Cytoplasm will flow easily from one to the other, the nuclei will combine, and it will become, for a time anyway, a single cell with two complete, alien genomes, ready to dance, ready to multiply.
Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell |