Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
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4.3 • 12 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the renowned biochemist and author of The Vital Question, an illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life.
“Nick Lane’s exploration of the building blocks that underlie life’s big fundamental questions—the origin of life itself, aging, and disease—have shaped my thinking since I first came across his work. He is one of my favorite science writers.”—Bill Gates
What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end?
For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight —how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise.
Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle—and its reverse—why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today.
Lane reveals the beautiful, violent world within our cells, where hydrogen atoms are stripped from the carbon skeletons of food and fed to the ravenous beast of oxygen. Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse, also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of life on our planet. Now it does both. How can the same pathway create and destroy? What might our study of the Krebs cycle teach us about the mysteries of aging and the hardest problem of all, consciousness?
Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our cells—what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the origin of life. Enlivened by Lane’s talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone fascinated by biology’s great mysteries. Life is at root a chemical phenomenon: this is its deep logic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biochemist Lane (The Vital Question) digs into the "merry-go-round of energy and matter known as the Krebs cycle" in this dense and demanding outing. "For decades, biology has been dominated by information—the power of genes," Lane writes, and aims to shift the focus instead to energy, which he writes "conjures... genes themselves into existence and still determines their activity, even in our information-soaked lives." To that end, he devotes chapters to topics related to the process involved in cellular respiration known as the Krebs cycle, discussing how spontaneous chemical reactions in the heat and pressure of undersea vents could have generated the basic building blocks of life in Earth's early days; how the Krebs cycle is involved in cancer; what the cycle can reveal about ageing; and proposing that energy "has to correspond in some way to the stream of consciousness." Unfortunately, he assumes readers will come equipped with a background in chemistry, suggesting at one point, for example, that "you can probably see where I'm going with this" before concluding that "when forwards flux through the Krebs cycle is impaired, cancer cells can make citrate by converting a-ketoglutarate into isocitrate, then citrate, through reverse flux." General readers can give this one a pass.
Customer Reviews
Problem with notes
The references to notes do note take you to the notes at the end of each chapter. However, When a note at the end of the chapter is tapped it takes you to the reference point! This needs to be reversed. Can someone fix this before I finish the book please?