How Life Works

Biology, Philip Ball argues, is going through a quiet but deep change, as several parts of the standard account of how living things work have turned out to be incomplete, misleading or simply wrong. Ball, a past winner of the Science Book Prize, sets out this new biology and finds life richer and more inventive than had been supposed. He describes how researchers can now redesign living systems, tissues and organisms, reprogramming cells to take on new tasks and to grow into structures never seen in nature. Some scientists, he reports, think it may eventually be possible to regrow limbs and organs, and perhaps to make new forms of life.

Tyler Cowen included it on his list of the best non-fiction of 2024.