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Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
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About This Book
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.Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.
Reviews
"By profiling researchers working on these inquiries, Zimmer shows the complexity of reaching a single answer as each proposed definition has its edge cases that provide challenging counter-examples ..."
"Zimmer gives ample space to nitpickers who point out exceptions, and a few chapters record interviews with scientists exploring each of these hallmarks."
"a pop science tour de force that extracts provocative insights from life's oddities."
"Zimmer invites us to observe, ponder, and celebrate life's exquisite diversity, nuances, and ultimate unity."
"elegant, deeply researched ..."
"No mere catalogue of errors, Life's Edge guides us from an abandoned mine in the Adirondacks where bats hang in homeostatic slumber to a California start-up attempting to synthesize RNA-based medications."
"One has the feeling, while reading this book, of fumbling through the unknown ..."
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