The cell is the basic building block of life. In its 3.5 billion years
on the planet, it has proven to be a powerhouse, spreading life first
throughout the seas, then across land, developing the rich and complex
diversity of life that populates the planet today.
With The Cell: A Visual Tour of the Building Block of Life, Jack
Challoner treats readers to a visually stunning tour of these remarkable
molecular machines. Most of the living things we're familiar with--the
plants in our gardens, the animals we eat--are composed of billions or
trillions of cells. Most multicellular organisms consist of many
different types of cells, each highly specialized to play a particular
role--from building bones or producing the pigment in flower petals to
fighting disease or sensing environmental cues. But the great majority
of living things on our planet exist as single cell. These cellular
singletons are every bit as successful and diverse as multicellular
organisms, and our very existence relies on them.
The book is an authoritative yet accessible account of what goes on
inside every living cell--from building proteins and producing energy to
making identical copies of themselves--and the importance of these
chemical reactions both on the familiar everyday scale and on the global
scale. Along the way, Challoner sheds light on many of the most
intriguing questions guiding current scientific research: What special
properties make stem cells so promising in the treatment of injury and
disease? How and when did single-celled organisms first come together to
form multicellular ones? And how might scientists soon be prepared to
build on the basic principles of cell biology to build similar living
cells from scratch.
