What Is Life?
Five Great Ideas in Biology
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
The Nobel Prize–winning scientist’s elegant explanation of the fundamental ideas in biology and their uses today.
The renowned biologist Paul Nurse has spent his career revealing how living cells work. In What Is Life?, he takes up the challenge of describing what it means to be alive in a way that every reader can understand.
It is a shared journey of discovery; step-by-step Nurse illuminates five great ideas that underpin biology—the Cell, the Gene, Evolution by Natural Selection, Life as Chemistry, and Life as Information. He introduces the scientists who made the most important advances, and, using his personal experiences in and out of the lab, he shares with us the challenges, the lucky breaks, and the thrilling eureka moments of discovery.
Nurse writes with delight at life’s richness and with a sense of the urgent role of biology in our time. To survive the challenges that face us all today—climate change, pandemic, loss of biodiversity and food security—it is vital that we all understand what life is.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel Prize winning geneticist Nurse takes a look at what makes up life in this eloquent introduction to biology. Nurse begins at the level of the cell, then works through genetics and natural selection, building toward descriptions of "life as chemistry" and "life as information." Along the way, he describes cell theory (the idea that "everything that is alive on the planet is either a cell or made up from a collection of cells"), Gregor Mendel's 19th-century experiments in plant breeding that led to the modern understanding of genetics, and how gene regulation allows for different life stages (a "formless embryo" growing into a "fully formed human being," for example). Nurse's love for the scientific method is evident throughout, as in his writing on Mendel's research (no "plant breeders before him had taken such a rigorous, extensive quantitative approach") and his enthusiastic explanations of his own laboratory work ("I cannot stress enough how satisfying it was to work all this out," he writes). Though the penultimate chapter, "Changing the World," feels out of place, as it switches from eloquent explanations to a more confrontational tone, Nurse has a knack for presenting biological ideas in precise, accessible language. Anyone wondering how life works would do well to pick this up.
