Skip to main content

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.

Hardback:    
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...