The Spark of Life
Electricity in the Human Body
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
'A wonderful book' Bill Bryson
'Ashcroft achieves the sort of rich simplicity most science writers can only dream about ... this book carries the eponymous spark of life' Sunday Telegraph
From before birth to the last breath we draw, from consciousness to sexual attraction, fighting infection to the beating of our hearts, electricity is essential to everything we think and do.
In The Spark of Life award-winning physiologist Frances Ashcroft reveals the secrets of ion channels, which produce the electrical signals in our cells. Can someone really die of fright? How do cocaine, LSD and morphine work? Why do chilli peppers taste hot? Ashcroft explains all this and more with wit and clarity. Anyone who has ever wondered about what makes us human will find this book a revelation.
'A rare gift for making difficult subjects accessible and fascinating' Bill Bryson
'She communicates complex science with engaging passion and eloquence' Helen Dunmore, Observer
'Compelling and very readable, an excellent writer' Literary Review
'Riveting ... she has a stock of good tales' New Scientist
'Lively, conversational prose, refreshingly accessible to any lay reader ... a positively charged little book' Daily Telegraph
Frances Ashcroft is Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College Oxford. She is also Director of OXION, a consortium of scientists studying ion channels, the heroes of this book. Her scientific research focuses on how a rise in your blood sugar level stimulates the release of insulin and what why this process goes wrong in diabetes. She has won many prizes for her research, most recently the L'Oreal/UNESCO 2012 Women in Science award. She is also a recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize for Science Writing for The Spark of Life. Her first book for the general reader was Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With style and enthusiasm, Oxford professor Ashcroft (Life at the Extremes) reveals the ubiquitous role electricity plays in our bodies. In the late 1700s, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani's experiments with frogs showed that animals produced their own electricity. His nephew Giovanni Aldini conducted public demonstrations using the corpses of recently executed criminals that gave the appearance of "re-animation" and probably sparked Mary Shelley's imagination when she created Frankenstein as well as the Victorian idea of the "mad scientist." But scientists didn't know how that electricity was produced in the body until the 1970s, when physicist Erwin Neher and physiologist Bert Sakmann measured the minuscule flow of current as potassium and sodium ions moved through tiny gates ion channels in a cell membrane. With this grounding, Ashcroft widens the story to explore everything from how different nerve agents, like puffer fish venom, curare, and botox, work, to how electric eels generate electricity, how defibrillators stabilize the heart's rhythms, and how our brains interpret sensory data. Ashcroft's writing is clear and accessible, offering surprising insights into the "electrical machine" we call the human body. 50 illus.
