What is Life? - Paul Nurse *****

Ever since the success of Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons in Physics there has been a fashion for short, smart-looking small hardbacks which almost always have a number in the title or subtitle. Paul Nurse's new (and first) book fits in perfectly as an attractive little number with the subtitle 'understanding biology in five steps'.

Such books fall into two broad categories. Some (like Seven Brief Lessons) are little more than expensive collections of a handfuls of woffly essays. But some - and What is Life? is a good example - manage to pack a surprising amount of content into an informative, readable bite-sized chunk, easily consumed on a commute or at bedtime.

Nurse makes no secret of the fact this is not a very original title, echoing amongst others quantum physicist Schrödinger's vastly influential book from the 1940s. However, what Nurse does here is quite different. Each of his five steps is a major component to understanding the nature of life: cells - his own subject which he describes as 'biology's atom' - genes, evolution, life as chemistry and life as information. All are good, but I was blown away by the 'life as chemistry' section, bring home as it does the sheer complexity and scale of the vast numbers of chemical reactions that are happening all the time through an organism, with many different reactions occurring within the confines of a cell.

For me, the weakest part of the book is that it isn't really in five steps. I'm happy to allow Nurse an introduction and a 'pull it all together' bit at the end, but there's a sixth step before that called 'changing the world' which seems to be an unstructured mix of opinion material that was quite interesting, but not directly relevant to the book's theme, such as his support for GM crops. It rather feels like the publisher lost their nerve about the five steps and asked for a bit more.

This certainly isn't a huge problem, though. There's so much in those five steps sections I'm happy anyway. If, like me, you have limited experience of biology - especially modern biology - it's a beautiful, succinct introduction to those five fascinating components.

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Review by Brian Clegg

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