Transformer The Deep Chemistry Of Life And Death
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| Author | : Nick Lane |
| Publisher | : W. W. Norton & Company |
| Total Pages | : 275 |
| Release | : 2022-07-12 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 0393651495 |
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.
| Author | : Nick Lane |
| Publisher | : Profile Books |
| Total Pages | : 353 |
| Release | : 2010-10-01 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 1847652220 |
Winner of the 2010 Royal Society Prize for science books Powerful new research methods are providing fresh and vivid insights into the makeup of life. Comparing gene sequences, examining the atomic structure of proteins and looking into the geochemistry of rocks have all helped to explain creation and evolution in more detail than ever before. Nick Lane uses the full extent of this new knowledge to describe the ten greatest inventions of life, based on their historical impact, role in living organisms today and relevance to current controversies. DNA, sex, sight and consciousnesses are just four examples. Lane also explains how these findings have come about, and the extent to which they can be relied upon. The result is a gripping and lucid account of the ingenuity of nature, and a book which is essential reading for anyone who has ever questioned the science behind the glories of everyday life.
| Author | : Nick Lane |
| Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
| Total Pages | : 370 |
| Release | : 2005-10-13 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 9780191513015 |
Mitochondria are tiny structures located inside our cells that carry out the essential task of producing energy for the cell. They are found in all complex living things, and in that sense, they are fundamental for driving complex life on the planet. But there is much more to them than that. Mitochondria have their own DNA, with their own small collection of genes, separate from those in the cell nucleus. It is thought that they were once bacteria living independent lives. Their enslavement within the larger cell was a turning point in the evolution of life, enabling the development of complex organisms and, closely related, the origin of two sexes. Unlike the DNA in the nucleus, mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively (or almost exclusively) via the female line. That's why it has been used by some researchers to trace human ancestry daughter-to-mother, to 'Mitochondrial Eve'. Mitochondria give us important information about our evolutionary history. And that's not all. Mitochondrial genes mutate much faster than those in the nucleus because of the free radicals produced in their energy-generating role. This high mutation rate lies behind our ageing and certain congenital diseases. The latest research suggests that mitochondria play a key role in degenerative diseases such as cancer, through their involvement in precipitating cell suicide. Mitochondria, then, are pivotal in power, sex, and suicide. In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, Nick Lane brings together the latest research findings in this exciting field to show how our growing understanding of mitochondria is shedding light on how complex life evolved, why sex arose (why don't we just bud?), and why we age and die. This understanding is of fundamental importance, both in understanding how we and all other complex life came to be, but also in order to be able to control our own illnesses, and delay our degeneration and death. 'An extraordinary account of groundbreaking modern science... The book abounds with interesting and important ideas.' Mark Ridley, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
| Author | : Nick Lane |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 385 |
| Release | : 2002 |
| Genre | : Health & Fitness |
| ISBN | : 0198607830 |
Oxygen offers fresh perspectives on our own lives and deaths, explaining modern killer diseases, why we age, and what we can do about it. Advancing revelatory new ideas, following chains of evidence, the book ranges through many disciplines, from environmental sciences to molecular medicine. Damage to DNA caused by oxidative stress appears to explain aging and many of its diseases, hence the popularity in alternative health circles of antioxidants. But antioxidants alone fail to prevent aging. Lane suggests two different avenues of study: modulation of the immune system, which generates free radicals as part of its defense against infectious diseases; and ways of improving the health of our cellular mitochondria, on which many age-related ailments seem to depend. Provocative and complexly argued. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
| Author | : Tim Lenton |
| Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
| Total Pages | : 440 |
| Release | : 2013-04-11 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 0191501778 |
The Earth that sustains us today was born out of a few remarkable, near-catastrophic revolutions, started by biological innovations and marked by global environmental consequences. The revolutions have certain features in common, such as an increase in complexity, energy utilization, and information processing by life. This book describes these revolutions, showing the fundamental interdependence of the evolution of life and its non-living environment. We would not exist unless these upheavals had led eventually to 'successful' outcomes - meaning that after each one, at length, a new stable world emerged. The current planet-reshaping activities of our species may be the start of another great Earth system revolution, but there is no guarantee that this one will be successful. The book explains what a successful transition through it might look like, if we are wise enough to steer such a course. This book places humanity in context as part of the Earth system, using a new scientific synthesis to illustrate our debt to the deep past and our potential for the future.
| Author | : Nick Lane |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 0 |
| Release | : 2016 |
| Genre | : Cells |
| ISBN | : 9781781250372 |
A game-changing book on the origins of life, called the most important scientific discovery 'since the Copernican revolution' in The Observer.
| Author | : Franklin M. Harold |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 225 |
| Release | : 2021-12-17 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 0197604544 |
Franklin M. Harold's On Life reveals what science can tell us about the living world. All creatures, from bacteria and redwoods to garden snails and humans, belong to a single biochemical family. We all operate by the same principles and are all made up of cells, either one or many. We flaunt capacities that far exceed those of inanimate matter, yet we stand squarely within the material world. So what is life, anyway? How do living things function, and how did they come into existence? Questions like these have baffled philosophers and scientists since antiquity, but over the past half-century answers have begun to emerge. Offering an inside look, Franklin M. Harold makes life accessible to readers interested in the biological big picture. The book traces how living things operate, focusing on the interplay of biology with physics and chemistry. He asserts that biology stands apart from the physical sciences because life revolves around organization-- that is, purposeful order. On Life aims to make life intelligible by giving readers an understanding of the biological landscape; it sketches the principles as biologists presently understand them and highlights major unresolved issues. What emerges is a biology bracketed by two stubborn mysteries: the nature of the mind and the origin of life. This portrait of biology is comprehensible but inescapably complex, internally consistent, and buttressed by a wealth of factual knowledge.
| Author | : Athel Cornish-Bowden |
| Publisher | : Elsevier |
| Total Pages | : 245 |
| Release | : 2014-05-20 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 1483161196 |
Fundamentals of Enzyme Kinetics details the rate of reactions catalyzed by different enzymes and the effects of varying the conditions on them. The book includes the basic principles of chemical kinetics, especially the order of a reaction and its rate constraints. The text also gives an introduction to enzyme kinetics - the idea of an enzyme-substrate complex; the Michaelis-Menten equation; the steady state treatment; and the validity of its assumption. Practical considerations, the derivation of steady-state rate equations, inhibitors and activators, and two-substrate reactions are also explained. Problems after the end of each chapter have also been added, as well as their solutions at the end of the book, to test the readers' learning. The text is highly recommended for undergraduate students in biochemistry who wish to study about enzymes or focus completely on enzymology, as most of the mathematics used in this book, which have been explained in detail to remove most barriers of understanding, is elementary.
| Author | : Richard Gordon |
| Publisher | : John Wiley & Sons |
| Total Pages | : 1268 |
| Release | : 2024-10-01 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 1119901022 |
This book surveys the models for the origin of life and presents a new model starting with shaped droplets and ending with life as polygonal Archaea; it collects the most published micrographs of Archaea (discovered only in 1977), which support this conclusion, and thus provides the first visual survey of Archaea. Origin of Life via Archaea’s purpose is to add a new hypothesis on what are called “shaped droplets”, as the starting point, for flat, polygonal Archaea, supporting the Vesicles First hypothesis. The book contains over 6000 distinct references and micrographs of 440 extant species of Archaea, 41% of which exhibit polygonal phenotypes. It surveys the intellectual battleground of the many ideas of the origin of life on earth, chemical equilibrium, autocatalysis, and biotic polymers. This book contains 17 chapters, some coauthored, on a wide range of topics on the origin of life, including Archaea’s origin, patterns, and species. It shows how various aspects of the origin of life may have occurred at chemical equilibrium, not requiring an energy source, contrary to the general assumption. For the reader’s value, its compendium of Archaea micrographs might also serve many other interesting questions about Archaea. One chapter presents a theory for the shape of flat, polygonal Archaea in terms of the energetics at the surface, edges and corners of the S-layer. Another shows how membrane peptides may have originated. The book also includes a large table of most extant Archaea, that is searchable in the electronic version. It ends with a chapter on problems needing further research. Audience This book will be used by astrobiologists, origin of life biologists, physicists of small systems, geologists, biochemists, theoretical and vesicle chemists.
| Author | : Oliver Morton |
| Publisher | : Harper Collins |
| Total Pages | : 74 |
| Release | : 2009-11-17 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 0007163657 |
Wherever there is greenery, photosynthesis is working to make oxygen, release energy, and create living matter from the raw material of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Without photosynthesis, there would be an empty world, an empty sky, and a sun that does nothing more than warm the rocks and reflect off the sea. Eating the Sun is the story of a world in crisis; an appreciation of the importance of plants; a history of the earth and the feuds and fantasies of warring scientists; a celebration of how the smallest things, enzymes and pigments, influence the largest things, the oceans, the rainforests, and the fossil fuel economy. Oliver Morton offers a fascinating, lively, profound look at nature's greatest miracle and sounds a much-needed call to arms—illuminating a potential crisis of climatic chaos and explaining how we can change our situation, for better or for worse.
