Bøger af Nick Lane

A game-changing book on the origins of life, called the most important scientific discovery 'since the Copernican revolution' in The Observer.

What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end?For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight -how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise.Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the "perfect circle" at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane's voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle-and its reverse-why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today.Lane reveals the beautiful, violent world within our cells, where hydrogen atoms are stripped from the carbon skeletons of food and fed to the ravenous beast of oxygen. Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse, also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of life on our planet. Now it does both. How can the same pathway create and destroy? What might our study of the Krebs cycle teach us about the mysteries of aging and the hardest problem of all, consciousness?Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our cells-what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the origin of life. Enlivened by Lane's talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone fascinated by biology's great mysteries. Life is at root a chemical phenomenon: this is its deep logic.

"Original and awe-inspiring ... an exhilarating tour of some of the most profound and important ideas in biology."-New Scientist

Describes the ten greatest inventions of life, including DNA, sex, sight and consciousness, based on their historical impact, role in living organisms and relevance to controversies. This book explains how these findings have come about, and the extent to which they can be relied upon.