From the renowned biochemist and author of The Vital Question, an illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life. “Nick Lane’s exploration of the building blocks that underlie life’s big fundamental questions—the origin of life itself, aging, and disease—have shaped my thinking ...
As Nick Lane tells it in his book “Transformer”, a biological cell is comparable to a big city: there are structures like buildings, there are pathways and flows, conveyer belts, machinery. One single cell undergoes one billion transformations a second.
“If we live to the age of eighty, we will have lived through nearly three billion billion (3 × 10^18) nanoseconds-worth of metabolism.”
If you shrink yourself to the size of a cell you would experience the electrical field in the cell as you would a lightning strike in human size.
Lane takes us on a tour of this cell city and shows us what powers it. Along the way we learn about the Krebs cycle, the proton gradient on the cell membrane and many more awe-inspiring things. All of this has connections to the biochemical origins of life, aging and cancer. You feel like you can follow along, even though as with most popular science books, you need an actual degree in the subject matter to really understand what is going on. If you are like me not knowing much chemistry, biology and physics, this won’t prevent you from enjoying the book because Lane still makes you sense the excitement of these scientific discoveries and the wonder of the processes happening inside a cell and how it all came to be.
You can check out his talk to the Royal Institute to get a condensed lecture version of the book contents.
And to recommend one more thing, Nick Lane was a guest on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast (episode 198) and they had a great discussion. One brilliant mind explaining the subject matter to another brilliant mind.