How Life Works
A User’s Guide to the New Biology
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“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies
A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.
Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—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. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).
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. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. 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 life sciences, 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.
