Nurse shares his wonder as he contemplates evolution and our “deep relatedness to other living things,” something that struck him while coming face-to-face with a gorilla - a species that shares about 96 percent of its DNA with humans - while on a trip in Uganda. Some of this activity comes from a cell’s enzymes, which can complete thousands to millions of precise chemical reactions per second. If one could peek inside a cell, for instance, “your senses would be assaulted by a boiling tumult of chemical activities,” he writes. He brings cells to life in a way that a textbook drawing can’t. Still, it’s spectacular to see the concepts come together as Nurse describes the chemistry of life and how organisms manage information within their cells and from the outside world. As might be expected for someone who won a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2001 for discovering how cells control growth and division ( SN: 10/10/01), Nurse’s ideas are rooted in the nuances of life as seen within a cell.Īlongside personal accounts of the discoveries that inspired and guided his own career, Nurse chronicles how researchers initially revealed the cell, “biology’s atom,” and uncovered that strings of genetic molecules hold the instructions to make cells work.įor readers familiar with this history, the book’s first few chapters might feel a little slow. He also examines how studying these aspects of life has helped us take better care of human life, such as developing heart surgery or genetically modified crops that make food more widely available. In What Is Life? Nurse guides readers through five big scientific ideas that he argues help define living things: cells, genes, evolution, life as chemistry and life as information. While scientists have spent centuries contemplating the question, there is still no universally accepted definition. “Asking biologists about what it means for something to be alive makes for an awkward conversation,” Zimmer writes. What Is Life? by geneticist Paul Nurse and Life’s Edge by science journalist Carl Zimmer explore how scientists have come to understand life and probe some of the entities that push its limits. So is a virus a form of life? What makes something alive? And a virus doesn’t eat food for energy, instead stealing energy from its host. But without a host cell to infect, a virus can’t make more copies of itself. Where might the coronavirus responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic belong? Viruses have their own genetic material and can evolve. Trees, bacteria and humans are alive rocks, smartphones and rainfall are not.īut in some cases, the distinction is murky. If everything in the world had to be divided into two bins - one for living things and one for nonliving - the task might seem easy.
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