Product Description
Erwin Schrodinger's 1944 classic What Is Life? is a small book that occupies a large place among the great written works of the twentieth century. It is said that it helped launch the modern revolution in biology and genetics, and inspired a generation of scientists, including Watson and Crick, to explore the riddle of life itself. Now, more than sixty years later, science writer Ed Regis offers an intriguing look at where this quest stands today. Regis ranges widely here, illuminating many diverse efforts to solve one of science's great mysteries. He examines the genesis of Schrodinger's great book--which first debuted as three public lectures in Dublin--and details the fantastic reception his ideas received, both in Europe and America. Regis also introduces us to the work of a remarkable group of scientists who are attempting literally to create life from scratch, starting with molecular components that they hope to assemble into the world's first synthetic living cell. The book also examines how scientists have unlocked the "three secrets of life," describes the key role played by ATP ("the ultimate driving force of all life"), and outlines the many attempts to explain how life first arose on earth, a puzzle that has given birth to a wide range of theories (which Francis Crick dismissed as "too much speculation running after too few facts"), from the primordial sandwich theory, to the theory that life arose in clay, in deep-sea vents, or in oily bubbles at the seashore, right up to Freeman Dyson's "theory of double origins." Written in a lively and accessible style, and bringing together a wide range of cutting-edge research, What is Life? makes an illuminating contribution to this ancient and ever-fascinating debate.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 5 reviews)

Regis is missing a great opportunity by Ãke Eckervall (Philippines)

3 Stars
May 24, 2009
I started reading the last chapter of this interesting summary of the What Is Life - debate with great expectations. But got rather disappointed. Why did Regis not take the opportunity to, at least, present some of the recent views based on a more holistisk biology/physics consideration ? When settling for the metabolic explanation he could as well have called it the 2nd - thermodynamic - law - explanation? Shouldn't he have give ample recognition to the `life is a particular pattern of energy flow/transformation' expressed in: Into The Cool by Schneider/Sagan; instead of pretending that he had not read that account? Then an idea on how `life' started -- simultaneously with the Big Bang, or Big Bounce, if you want -- and that the entropy production and feeding on neg - entropy reality defines the starting point as well as what so many call `life'. This debate needs such a broadening. Ake Eckerwall

A good book by Bernardette S. Abrao (São Paulo, Brasil)

4 Stars
January 12, 2009
That's a didatic book about the history of the chemical and biological discoveries about life and the meaning of life's concept. Sometimes it's boring, because of the didatism, but, in general, it's a good book, specially to those who like science history and its development.

Beyond Frankenstein - Polymath07 review by Polymath07 (Mid-Atlantic, USA)

4 Stars
May 14, 2008
The recent book by Ed Regis, "What is Life? Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology", may be considered the third of a series. In 1945, Edwin Schrodinger, of the "Schrodinger Equation" that can (with strenuous labor) calculate the properties of any atom's electron cloud, and whose eponymous Cat defines the dilemma of quantum phenomena in a macroscopic world, wrote "What is life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell", in which he did not answer the title question, but explored life phenomena from a strictly chemical and physical aspect. He predicted crucial aspects of the genetic code a decade or two in advance of their discovery. Then in 1995 Lynn Margulis brought certain of the same themes more up to date in "What is Life?", shortly thereafter revised and reprinted with her son Dorian Sagan as co-author. As Ed Regis reports, Margulis and Sagan answered the question in so many ways that it is not answered at all. Author Regis begins his book with a look at the formation of a four-way consortium in 2002, with the aim of specifically creating a living cell not based on previously living matter. To date, the effort has not succeeded, but as Edison would have said, they are learning a great number of things that don't work...and a few that offer tantalizing clues to what might work. So much so, that the government is now interested, as evidenced by the Los Alamos Protocells web site (protocells.lanl.gov) and its link to protocell.org, a jumping-off place to a handful of major efforts in the Synthetic Life arena. Regis does home in on an answer, a minimalist definition that life is "embodied metabolism". A few caveats are needed, such as a measure of autonomy and of self-repair, for example: An automobile consumes fuel and moves about, but does not direct its own motions nor maintain itself, while a portion of the metabolism of living cells goes to structural regeneration and growth. And "embodied" is needed to distinguish living matter from open flames. More generally speaking, living things not only metabolize, they also reproduce and evolve. Not every individual will do so, but all can do so. And, specifically for all life that we know, all life processes are directed by coded instructions. DNA carries the instructions, while RNA plus proteins carry them out. Synthetic cells could be based on DNA, RNA and proteins, or it could instead use different chemistry, perhaps not even based on carbon. But whenever a wholly synthetic "embodied metabolism" gets cranked up, performing as cells perform, I suppose we'll have to dub it "living". This is quite a step beyond our fearsome archetype, the Frankenstein monster. That creature was supposedly produced by re-animating a sewn-together collection of bits of corpses. Certain partial successes in the synthetic life area have been analogous to this. But the goal is to create living cells from chemicals, not from various bits taken from other cells. The rub comes if the creators of synthetic life endow it with the ability to reproduce; the ability to evolve will come along as baggage immediately. At that point, no matter what precautions they may take, SynLife (not my term: Google yields 3,770 hits) will most certainly escape into "our" environment, evolve so as to take advantage of it, and then we'll REALLY learn what it is like to live with invasive alien species! Sparrows, multiflora roses, and zebra mussels will probably pale by comparison. I suggest that, really early on, SynLife cells be presented as a challenge to a large variety of prokaryotes, so they'll have a chance to develop resistance mechanisms and chemicals that we can later exploit when we need AntiSynBiotics!!

Updated Answer to a Big Question by R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)

5 Stars
May 05, 2008
"What is the meaning of life?" is a question all must ponder at some point or other. But that's too fancy; try the even more basic, "What is life?" In 1944, Nobel prizewinner and quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger published a small book with that question as a title, and it has been enormously influential, cited and debated ever since. There have even been other books with the same title since then, trying to definitively corral a huge and amorphous subject. Now science writer Ed Regis has added another, to take in the philosophical and biological efforts of our times: _What Is Life?: Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). My guess is that it is not going to be the last book of the title; the definition game demands that new discoveries and ideas have to play their roles in our understanding of what life is. However, we are on the brink of making cells out of basic molecules, and Regis has a good introduction for those of us who are living through an extraordinary time in experimental molecular biology. Schrödinger's book was a last stand against vitalism, the idea that there was something going on within creatures, organs, and cells that science could not understand. Life chemistry was thoroughly within known laws of thermodynamics. If what goes on in a cell is really only the jostling, linking, and breaking up of atoms and molecules, it makes sense that scientists could just get the right atoms and molecules together and get the whole thing going from scratch. The problem, of course, is that the whole mess is extraordinarily complicated even for the simplest of cells. Regis gives a good short history of how we came to know how complicated it all was. Definitions of life have been said to include necessarily reproduction (but mules are sterile, and are still alive) and also evolution (but evolved or evolving or not, any particular animal is still alive). What really needs to be taken into account in a definition of life is metabolism, the sum total of bodily chemical processes, including molecules into a body and molecules out of it. "Embodied metabolism" is, Regis writes, "at least as adequate as any other definition of life that has been offered to date." Adequate, but like any other definition, it gets iffy at the edges. What about viruses, that do have bodies, if you can call a chemical capsule a body, but are just inert chemically until they find a cell to latch upon and infect? There is something disconcerting about just chemicals connecting and disconnecting being all there is to the living process. By some changes in degree, inert carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and the rest, eventually become living creatures, and even develop consciousness. And yet, vitalism is dead; "There must be more to life" is true on philosophical levels, but not biological or biochemical ones. That this is more clearly becoming true is shown in Regis's fascinating descriptions of current efforts in synthetic biology. Using synthetic gene sequences alone, scientists were able to manufacture a polio virus in 2002. Making a virus, which has characteristics both of being alive and inert, was one step; tinkering with living cells to rewire their function (like getting _E. coli_ to manufacture an antimalarial drug) is another sort of step, and also has the potential for becoming a big business. Making a cell from scratch, though, is the goal of firms like ProtoLife, whose business plan "is founded on an attempt to start life over, to begin from the beginning." ProtoLife's goal of creating artificial cells is not just so that we will learn more about how natural genetics and metabolism work and regulate themselves, though we are sure to do that along the way. ProtoLife is in it for the money, hoping someday to sell manufactured cells that might produce drugs, clean up waste, grab carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and who knows what else. Regis's review cannot have the canonical status of Schrödinger's influential work, but serves wonderfully as a clearly written update and introduction to new ways of looking at a vital question.

A popular-science writer explores basic questions by Roy E. Perry (Nolensville, Tennessee)

4 Stars
April 27, 2008
In 1944, Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger published a book with the same name as the current volume: "What Is Life?" Popular science writer Ed Regis points out that Schroedinger "wanted to challenge the notion that at the core of life was some impalpable excrescence that lay beyond the grasp of science." This optimistic view holds that life can be explained in the same terms, and by the same laws of physics and chemistry, as those that pertain to everything else in nature. To be sure, life is exceptional, but it is rule-governed and law-abiding; there is nothing inherently magical or mystical about it. Ultimately, scientists will be able to unravel all of life's mysteries. Present-day scientists are not so sanguine. The question, "What Is life?", Regis suggests, lies more in the realm of religion, philosophy, and metaphysics--and by extension, politics and ethics--than in the realm of science. At first glance, a tangential approach to the question, "What is life?" promises a satisfying solution: "Unquestionably, if there was anything that appeared obvious about what it meant to be alive, it was possessing the ability to die." One's hopeful expectations of an answer, however, are dashed by this consideration: There is no agreement concerning what death is. In between life and death there is often "a state of near-death, or pseudo-life." If one insists on a scientific answer, Regis suggests the following, "Defining life as embodied metabolism . . . seems to be the most defensible theory we have at the present." If you expect a definitive answer to the question "What is life?", this book will disappoint you. Ed Regis holds a Ph.D. In philosophy from New York University and taught for many years at Howard University. He is now a full-time science writer, contributing to Scientific American, Harper's Magazine, Wired, Discover, and The New York Times, among other periodicals. He is the author of several books, including The Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project.

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