FINALIST FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD***A
NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021***A SCIENCE NEWS FAVORITE
BOOK OF 2021***A SMITHSONIAN TOP TEN SCIENCE BOOK OF 2021
"Stories that both dazzle and edify... This book is not just about life,
but about discovery itself." --Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times
Book Review
We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about
the living world--from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic
viruses--the harder they find it is to locate life's edge.
Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is
life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is
the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple
tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can't answer that
question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien
life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society's most
charged conflicts--whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for
example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.
Life's Edge is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but
one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could
craft. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have
attempted to re-create life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what
that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious
winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a
theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are
essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of
history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists
are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and
multiply. Have they made life in the lab?
Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating
bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at
its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube
with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's
monster and how the world briefly believed radium was the source of all
life, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers
engineering life from scratch.
