Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Generations of students have learned how the Krebs cycle generates the building blocks of life and fuels the furnace of respiration. Biochemist Nick Lane is among the vanguard of researchers who ask how this complex, contradictory pathway of creation, destruction, and renewal within our cells could help us understand questions from the origins of life to the devastation of cancer.
In Transformer, Lane guides readers through the "conflicted merry-go-round of energy and matter" that is the Krebs cycle. Along the way, Lane brilliantly recounts the scientific detective work that discovered this process while deconstructing textbook views about metabolism. Transformer traces the primacy of the Krebs cycle--and its reverse--from deep sea hydrothermal vents and the "Cambrian Explosion" to the individual, yet universal, experience of aging. Enlivened by Lane's talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone fascinated by biology's great mysteries.
Synopsis
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.