About the book
At the heart of Nick Lane's account of life is a cycle of reactions that draws on energy to build the components of living matter from inorganic molecules, and that can also run backward. Lane challenges the idea that biology is mainly about the information carried by genes, pointing out that a living cell and one that has just died hold the same information. He returns instead to an older question: what processes animate cells and separate them from lifeless matter. Lane connects this cycle to the origin of life and to cancer, to the first photosynthetic bacteria and to human mitochondria, and to the emergence of consciousness. It was published in 2022.
Lex Fridman counted it among his favorite books about biology, science and life, introducing Lane as a biochemist at University College London.
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The following is a conversation with Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London, and author of some of my favorite books on biology, science, and life ever written, including his two most recent titles, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, and The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?
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