How Life Works
A User’s Guide to the New Biology
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Publisher Description
'An essential primer on humanity’s ongoing quest to understand the secrets of life . . . Excellent . . . Ball is a terrific writer.' – Adam Rutherford, The Guardian
'Ball is a ferociously gifted science writer . . . There is so much [here] that is amazing . . . urgent . . . astonishing.' – The Sunday Times
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 journey into this new frontier of the nature of life, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nearly all "the neat stories that researchers routinely tell about how living cells work are incomplete, flawed, or just totally mistaken," according to this bold report. Science writer Ball (Beautiful Experiments) explains how advances in biology have upended traditional understandings of how organisms develop and reproduce. The most revelatory material pushes back against the notion that DNA constitutes the "blueprint" for life. For instance, Ball notes that mutations in the Wnt1 gene, which appears in many animal species, were found to hinder wing growth in flies yet cause cancer in mice, suggesting that genes don't have a one-to-one effect on physical attributes. Instead, Ball explains, genes merely "impart capabilities" as cells develop into organisms by responding to chemical signals from their environment and neighboring cells. The author takes glee in tearing down scientific shibboleths (" ‘Our fate,' James Watson has said, ‘is in our genes.' ") and his penetrating analysis underscores the stakes of outdated assumptions about DNA, as when he argues that the "blueprint" metaphor for the genome falsely suggests there's only one "normal" developmental trajectory and casts as "aberrations" such conditions as autism, which he contends is just one of the human genome's myriad possible biological outcomes. Provocative and profound, this has the power to change how readers understand life's most basic mechanisms. Photos.
