276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

All living cells power themselves by coaxing energetic electrons from one side of a membrane to the other. Membrane-based mechanisms for accomplishing this are, in a sense, as universal a feature of life as the genetic code. But unlike the genetic code, these mechanisms are not the same everywhere: The two simplest categories of cells, bacteria and archaea, have membranes and protein complexes for producing energy that are chemically and structurally dissimilar. Those differences make it hard to guess how the very first cells met their energy needs. A living cell and one that just died have the same DNA. Put differently, both cells have precisely the same information content. Just as the flow of people and goods, rather than the arrangement of the buildings, determines that a city is alive, the fluxes of metabolites and energy characterise a living cell. Modern biology is often solely discussed in terms of information. In "Transformer", Lane argues that metabolism is at least as important. This viewpoint of "follow the goods" is also emphasised on a completely different scale by Vaclav Smil in "How the World Really Works".

His book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, won the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. [5] He appeared on In Our Time on Radio Four on 13 September 2012, when the topic of discussion was the cell, [6] and again on 15 May 2014, when the topic was photosynthesis. [7] Books [ edit ] the Krebs cycle is really, really old. Not quite as old as life, but as old as oxygen in the atmosphere, at least. This touches on some elemental concepts, and Lane is fine with that. He’s devoted this entire book to explaining an incredibly complex chemical cycle to a general reading public that’s more scientifically illiterate than any in over a century (in 2022, roughly 83 million Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth); if he doesn’t want the whole of Transformer to read like this: “The enzyme that catalyses the interconversion of isocitrate into a-ketoglutarate is known as isocitrate dehydrogenase,” he’s going to have to do plenty of this kind of elemental generalizing: “To understand this cycle of energy and matter is to resolve the deep chemical coherence of the living world, connecting the origin of life with the devastation of cancer, the first photosynthetic bacteria with our own mitochondria, the abrupt evolutionary leap to animals with sulfurous sludge, the big history of our planet with the trivial differences between ourselves, perhaps even the stream of consciousness.”

Reviews

The alternative is that these things happen spontaneously under favorable conditions, and that you get very small amounts of interconversion from one intermediate into the next intermediate all the way down that whole pathway. It wouldn’t be very much, and it wouldn’t be very fast compared to enzyme-catalyzed reactions, but it would be there. Then when a gene arises at some later stage, it can catalyze any of those steps, which will tend to speed up the whole pathway. In a footnote, the author confides that “probably only a tenth of what I wanted to write about actually made it into the book.” On behalf of humanities majors everywhere, I can only say thank goodness. Lane notes that "cancer is a disease of the genome is too close to dogma." Different mutations are found in different parts of many tumours, often with little if any overlap, implying that the mutations accumulated during the growth of the tumor, rather than triggering its inception. Moreover, the same oncogene mutations are often found in normal tissues surrounding a tumor,

H2 will push its electrons onto the catalyst in alkaline conditions, but CO2 will only accept them from the catalyst in acidic conditions. Virtually all cells pump H+ out, making the outside about three pH units more acidic than the inside. What is a feeling—love or hunger or pain—in physical terms? There is no obvious reason why the release of neurotransmitters or the depolarization of neurons should feel like anything at all. Once cells similar to bacteria (the first prokaryotes, cells without a nucleus) had emerged, he writes, they stayed like that for two and a half billion years. Then, just once, cells jumped in complexity and size, acquiring a nucleus and other organelles, and complex behavioural features including sex, which he notes have become universal in complex ( eukaryotic) life forms including plants, animals, and fungi. [17]

What does Lane say is the best thing we can do to have long healthy lives? You’d never guess. Eat a modest quantity of healthy food and stay active. 🙂 But be aware, there’s a large element of chance in health. No, of course not; they are cities. We know them intimately from the inside, even if most of us know little about the flow of energy and materials through our own cities. We know them mainly by their visible structures, buildings on a map. But an empty city with no power, no energy flow, no traffic, no jostling crowds, is an eerie place, chilling and post-apocalyptic. Dead. What brings a city to life is the people, their movement from place to place, along with the flow of materials that sustains our daily existence – electricity, heat, water, gas, sewage. Marshall, Michael (11 November 2020). "Charles Darwin's hunch about early life was probably right - In a few scrawled notes to a friend, biologist Charles Darwin theorised how life began. Not only was it probably correct, his theory was a century ahead of its time". BBC News . Retrieved 11 November 2020. So tissue differentiation is not only about having genes that say, “This is going to become a liver,” or “This is going to become nervous tissue.” It allows lifestyles that were just not possible before, and it allowed the first worms to get through bad conditions that killed everything else. The Cambrian explosion happened after that. When oxygen levels finally did rise, these glorified worms with multiple tissues were suddenly the only show in town. This ties into some of your ideas about cancer. Since the 1970s, most of the biomedical establishment working to cure and prevent cancers has focused on oncogenes. Yet you argue that cancer isn’t a genomic disease so much as a metabolic one. Can you explain why?

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment