How Life Works

A User's Guide to the New Biology

eBook

English language

Published Nov. 9, 2023 by Pan Macmillan.

ISBN:
978-1-5290-9601-9
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A cutting-edge new vision of biology that proposes to revise our concept of what life is – from Science Book Prize winner Philip Ball. Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.

In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping …

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reviewed How Life Works by Philip Ball

A dense but entertaining book about what we know about how life works.

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A dense, but fascinating book on a puzzling subject: how does life work. The author freely admits that he doesn't have the answer, and biologists are still working on the problem. But what he does say is that the 'gene-centric' view of life, sometimes pushed to ridiculous limits (i.e., "it is not my fault, my genes made me do it"), is incorrect and won't lead us to the answers as to how life works and what makes life so different from non-life.

Starting from the smallest details, the author shows that while DNA does store the information needed to produce proteins and RNA, it is very far from being the 'blueprint of life'. The Human Genome Project, covered by the author, may have decoded the genes that make us human, but it is still far from helping us to solve the problem of how to make a human from a …