What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end?
For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic
information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes
us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a
flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of
life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific
renaissance that is hiding in plain sight --how the same simple
chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise.
Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle,
the "perfect circle" at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more
than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane's voyage,
as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle--and its
reverse--why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today.
Lane reveals the beautiful, violent world within our cells, where
hydrogen atoms are stripped from the carbon skeletons of food and fed to
the ravenous beast of oxygen. Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse,
also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of
life on our planet. Now it does both. How can the same pathway create
and destroy? What might our study of the Krebs cycle teach us about the
mysteries of aging and the hardest problem of all, consciousness?
Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our
cells--what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the
origin of life. Enlivened by Lane's talent for distilling and humanizing
complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone
fascinated by biology's great mysteries. Life is at root a chemical
phenomenon: this is its deep logic.
