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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
"A fascinating and well-written mapping of the edges of biology, which will have broad appeal to nonscientists."
"An ingenious case that the answers to life's secrets are on the horizon."
"This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself."
"a pop science tour de force that extracts provocative insights from life's oddities."
"I found myself feeling very grateful that Zimmer had drawn connections among these disparate themes."
"Zimmer diligently tackles the true definition of life ..."
"To read this book is to realize that life's insistence on fluttering out of our grasp is a consequence of our desire to pin it down like a butterfly on a board."
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