Product Description
The origin of life from inanimate matter has been the focus of much research for decades, both experimentally and philosophically. Luisi takes the reader through the consecutive stages from prebiotic chemistry to synthetic biology, uniquely combining both approaches. This book presents a systematic course discussing the successive stages of self-organisation, emergence, self-replication, autopoiesis, synthetic compartments and construction of cellular models, in order to demonstrate the spontaneous increase in complexity from inanimate matter to the first cellular life forms. A chapter is dedicated to each of these steps, using a number of synthetic and biological examples. With end of chapter review questions to aid reader comprehension, this book will appeal to graduate students and academics researching the origin of life and related areas such as evolutionary biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, biophysics and natural sciences.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 4 reviews)

The Chemical Problems and Solutions Faced in Origins of Life Research by F. Ramos (Ontario, CA USA)

5 Stars
July 14, 2009
Pier Luisi has done an excellent job in bringing in many relevant viewpoints, methods of approach, and the current standing of Origins of Life research as of 2006. This book is not an easy read due to it's general technical language and is at a higher caliber than "popular science" books. This book is aimed towards Biochemists, Physical Chemists, and Molecular Biologists, but there are a few sections where a lay reader will understand and not get confused by much. We have come along quite a bit since the Urey-Miller experiment and Oparin and now we currently face a complicated and sophisticated understanding of how hard it is for scientists (mainly Biochemists and other Chemists) to synthesize fundamental life. This work brings the reader up to date with detailed and technical information from research papers that have been formerly published from all over the world. For this work, it is very much recommended that anyone who wishes to read it, to be familiar and have a decent background with Biochemistry, Organic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, and General Chemistry to get the most out of this technical book and to understand some of the significance of the information presented for example, understanding chemical pathways and concepts like hydrolysis would definitely help. After Chapter 9 Luisi gets more technical and many may lose what he is trying to say. This book is very helpful too for anyone's world view , whether it is believed nature is all that there is or if is believed a Cosmic Biochemist/ Physical Chemist generated life or allowed for life to emerge. I personally doubt that nature alone has the capacity to spawn life on her own due to the complicated chemical behavior of molecules and energy considerations of chemical bond and so it seems a Cosmic Biochemist would have had to have been involved in the process of generating life indefinitely. No need to worry that belief in a Cosmic Biochemist will stop or halt any further research on the topic of Origins of Life. Newton's belief in God didn't stop or impede his work on mechanics, optics,and calculus, nor did Francis Bacon's belief in God impede his synthesis for the "scientific method(s)", nor did Hippocrates views of illnesses as having origins in nature and not by the will of the gods; affect his practice of medicine, nor did Lord Kelvin's belief in God impede his work on the absolute thermometric scale, by the way. With the overwhelming abundance of hydrocarbons found in oil (more than 20,000 according to BP and Chevron when they gave a talk to our Chemical Engineering classes) and rich biochemical residues that have existed for presumably hundreds of millions of years in isolation with millions of opportunities to spawn life in these oil fields from all around the world, it sure feels pretty nonsensical that life could really from by nature alone. Life should have formed and should STILL be forming today, especially with the abundance of biochemical materials that can used to form life. Truly, life forming is a ridiculously rare event since it only happened once on this planet. Life hasn't been observed to spawn on its own by any scientist despite the rigorous search and attempts at synthesis. If you want to see more on the difficulty of spawning life step into the biochemical universe of how to generate simple life forms. You'll see what I am talking about more clearly. This book will give insights to the limits and capacity of Nature. Life emerging is definitely no simple matter and nature seems to posit many Biochemical impedances that are pretty important to take into consideration. For example, all chemical reactions are influenced and affected by : temperature, pressure, thermodynamic stability, dilution, concentration, pH, chirality, hydrophobicity, hydrophilicity, agitation, polarity/nonpolarity, limiting reagents (reactions are limited by the molarity of one given reactant), steric hindrance (big molecules rotating fast blocking reactants from reacting, thus little or no reaction occurs), vapor/liquid equllibria (if these two phases coexist in a given environment), crystallization, diffusion, oxidation, reduction, solubility, reversibility of chemical reactions, activation energies, entropy, emergent physical and chemical properties from constituent atoms, and many other factors. Stuff like this makes for Origins of Life research so interesting and very sophisticated. Luisi's "Why this...and not that?" approach sets the difficulties and solutions into perspective on the plausible and implausible ways life came to be with all of it's sophistication. Here is a detailed look by Chapter on stuff that is mentioned and detailed in this textbook: Ch 1: Discourse on creationism and science; two main views on the emergence of life: Contingency and Determinism; plausibility of multiple Origins of Life at many locations and multiple times (11); SETI, the Anthropic Principle Ch 2: Discourse on the Difficulties of defining life everywhere as "Darwinian" (22); Intrinsic vs Operational descriptions; more than 30 different models of Origins of Life have been generated thus far (26); popular textbook "RNA emerging out of some prebiotic or primordial soup" lacks evidence and is naive according to Luisi (28); problems in generating RNA; Clay Deposits may function as storage for needed chemical products found in life forms; impedances and improbabilities of prebiotic metabolism (30-40); Ch 3: Discourse on the Oparin-Miller Soup and the Urey-Miller Experiment; 40,000 tons of stardust settling on Earth per year (47); Polycyclic aromatics found in the Cosmos, hydrocarbons make 10% of Cosmic Carbon, C8's detected in space, what is not found in space: peptides and mononucleotides, chemical extraction from meteorites is difficult (49); why alpha-amino acids formed in the Urey-Miller Experiment (52); chirality (D or L) of amino acids may be nonfunctional for life Ch 4: Discourse on benefits of enzymes and proteins being long chained entities, proteins and nucleic acids as complementary co-polymers, reaction rates have not been done for amino acids, the problem of peptides as being insoluble and having thermodynamic constraints, weak point of prebiotic chemistry is the weak "prebiotic activation" where activation energy is usually not satisfied to proceed without aid to reaction; chemical reactions for long chain polymers are done on clays since long chain polymers are impeded in reactivity in water (problems of hydrolysis) (59-62); volcanic gas (COS) can form some polypeptides, but not long chain peptides with many residues (65); both polynucleotide and polypeptide research is young and self-replicating nucleotides have not been achieved (67); prebiotic pathways for both polypeptides and polynucleotides have not emerged, De Duve's "Sequence Paradox" is mentioned on the sequence order precision that is difficult to acquire with short polypeptide sequences, and why some proteins never formed or did not survive after forming (68-72); he also tried to make light on the frequency of folding that occurs in random sequences of proteins, a model is posited for elongation sequences (72-76); co-oligopepetides and co-oligonucleotides of 30 residues have been produced in "honest" prebiotic conditions, but have not been characterized (83); how probiotc RNA forming (is seen in many textbooks today) is a naïve look at origins of life according to Luisi Ch 5: Important distinction between "self-assembly" and "self-organization"; discourse on crystallization and surfactant aggregation (surface mixing); interactions under thermodynamic (spontaneous = "free energy change") control and kinetic (non-spontaneous) control Ch 6: "Emergence" is defined; emergent properties: "the whole is more than the sum of the parts"( Ex: the properties of H20 are not found in H2 or O2 individually); emergent properties in music, geometry, and macro evolution; discourse on reductionism, deducibility, and predictability; Life is seen as an emergent property Ch 7: Subtle differences between "self-replication" and "self-reproduction"; importance of finding autocatalytic processes that replicate as they reproduce; myths of self-replication (132-133); slef-replicating "enzyme-free" systems (134-143); DNA can only replicate with the help of many enzymes, not by itself (134); section on self-reproducing micelles and vesicles (143-152) Ch 8: "Autopoiesis" defined; discourse on "internal" reproductive systems by the system reproducing itself within the system itself; "auto regulating" processes and "cognition" interactions and "consciousness" ; "enactions" as a process of adaption of environment and at the same time having co-emergence from within the organism. Ch 9: Surfactant aggregated chemistry and relevant hindrances and occurrences of mixing; micelle compartmentation; solubilation in reverse micellar solutions; prebiotic membranes (non-phospholipids) are hard to generate from basic lipids and fatty acids by meteorites seem to have materials for membrane generation; vesicular structure formation discussed Ch 10: all about vesicle formation, reproduction, and chemistry; examples of enzyme-catalyzed reactions that have occurred inside lipid vesicles; vesicle competition Ch 11: early cells may resemble the simplest cells found today: "Mycoplasma genitalia" and "Buchnera" that have genomes with less than 500 coding regions (244); also there a plausible approach, "roadmap", to making a minimal cell and some requirements needed to generate a minimal cell Overlook: Here Luisi concludes with his personal view of the Origins of Life and what he thinks can and cannot be achieved theoretically and empirically. Overall, bravo for Pier Luisi for writing such a detailed book and summary on the Origins of Life research. For those looking to research the topic further from technical standpoints please look at the Journal: "Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres" where research on this topic may be found. Luisi referenced this Journal many times in the book. For this Journal you have to have a good handle on Physical, Organic, and Biochemical knowledge and terminology to appreciate the research. Or look at Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints (Advances in Astrobiology and Biogeophysics) and Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life for more on the Origins of Life topic.

The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology by California Star

5 Stars
January 21, 2009
How could life emerge from unanimate matter? Despite the importance of this question and its broad public interest, the field of research in origin-of-life is relatively undermined in the scientific community. This field doesn't offer a promising carrier for a young scientist, mainly because of its slow development and the fact that it doesn't benefit from recent technical progress, as is the case with other fields, Therefore, as a result of its small scientific community, contrasted by its large public issue and demand, many books have been published on this topic, a wide range of which present chapters written by the same authors. The results is a great redundancy of information as well as scientific views. If you've read half a dozen books on the origin-of-life and you're looking for something fresher, more vibrant, which presents a new outlook on the subject, then stop looking, this is the book for you! Pier Luigi Luisi is a chemist who has devoted his scientific carrier to this important question in modern biology. As author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications, he has covered a great deal of various approaches to the origin of life, as well as a multitude of other books on fields directly related to the subject, such as "Giant Vesicles" and "Self-Production of Supramolecular Structures" (also found in Amazon). Luisi's "The Emergence of Life" is a systematic overview of the field, as seen from an insider. Each part of the big picture, from prebiotic soup to the minimal cell, is thoroughly divided into single chapters and given a critical review, each time carefully pointing out the weakness of our current ideas on the various steps of life evolving from matter. I think even a creationist could greatly benefit from this book as it will give him/her a large variety of arguments to criticize the "non-Intelligent Design approach" to the Origin of Life ;) Each chapter ends with a few questions for the reader, many of which have a charming balance between philosophy and chemistry put into one sentence. For example, the first question in chapter 5 (which covers the topic of "Self-organization") is: "Do you accept the idea that self-organization in prebiotic times was the main driving force for the formation of the first living cells? (If not, what would you add to the picture?)" While his approach leads to more general philosophical problems, Luisi doesn't dodge these topics, rather, he deals with each and every one with great care, as in the case of the importance of the theory of autopoiesis in understanding consciousness (for the author's competance in this field, I would like to mention another book he has recently written: "Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality", which just received a positive review in Nature). While most of the book deals with serious chemical problems, philosophical topics are dealt with delicately and in a highly constructed manner, resulting in a book with both a wide range of scientific information as well as an extensive overview of the highly philosophical, ethical nature of this field.

enrgence of life by Luisi by Gary K. Coffman

5 Stars
May 18, 2008
I found this book to be an excellent review of the scientific literature that relates to the chemistry of the origin of life. The author brings forth the concepts and the relevant experiments to those concepts. His diagrams and graphs are a great help towards understanding. I used it as a textbook this past year for an introductory course in which one has at least a college sophmore's knowledge of chemistry and biology. I will be using it again. The more valuable aspect for me was the review of the literature.

Opened questions - no answers by Rob - ox in Brazil fields

5 Stars
March 22, 2008
The Emergence of Life by Pier Luigi Luisi is a thoughtful book. It is not a book where to find easy answers on how the life appeared on Earth. Rather, on the contrary. The author scholastic and erudition is impressive on subjects from fundamental physics and chemistry up to polictics and language. Luisi included topics as difficult to define as self-organization and emergence, not only in the biological and biochemical context, but also in social behaviour and economics, for example. The text is crystal-clear, based mostly on arguments from others, but also by the author's personal thinkings based on a life long scientific carreer (over 300 scientific publications), first at the ETH-Zurich (Switzerland) then at Rome 3 (Italy). The book is strongly based on scientific support and thoroughly referenced (over 500 scientific references, including papers of scientific journals and books), and includes an excellent subject index. Graphs and figures are of good support to understand the text. I really recommend it for readers interested on the non-trivial hypotheses of life arousal on Earth. A point (?): Luisi does not include any religious discussion in his book. I was very pleased with his well balanced way of thinking.

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview by Iris Fry (Author) "Essential reading for people in disciplines ranging from philosophy to biology. It is simply the best general book that I know on the question of the origin of life." --Michael Ruse, author of Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? "Fry has fashioned a masterful account of the history, philosophy, and science of the origin of life and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Her story weaves profound Western ideas of who we are and where we came from, from Aristotle to...
	Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins by Robert Hazen (Author) Life on Earth arose nearly 4 billion years ago, bursting forth from air, water, and rock. Though the process obeyed all the rules of chemistry and physics, the details of that original event pose as deep a mystery as any facing science. By what process did life actually begin? How did non-living chemicals become alive? Where, when, and how did life emerge on the blasted, barren face of our primitive planet? Author Robert Hazen is one of the world’s foremost scientists seeking...
	Beginnings of Cellular Life: Metabolism Recapitulates Biogenesis by Professor Harold J. Morowitz (Author) "This book is an extraordinary integration of a lifetime of thought on the subject by an exceptional scholar. Morowitz logically, consistently, and persuasively moves to define arguments that will influence thought in a fundamental realm of biology." -Donald M. Engelman, Yale University. "Morowitz develops a model of the origin of life in which cells originate first, proteins follow, and genes evolve last. This model contradicts conventional wisdom but has the distinct advantage of being...
	Life's Origin: The Beginnings of Biological Evolution by J. William Schopf (Editor) Always a controversial and compelling topic, the origin of life on Earth was considered taboo as an area of inquiry for science as recently as the 1950s. Since then, however, scientists working in this area have made remarkable progress, and an overall picture of how life emerged is coming more clearly into focus. We now know, for example, that the story of life's origin begins not on Earth, but in the interiors of distant stars. This book brings a summary of current research and ideas on...
	An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits (Chapman & Hall/Crc Mathematical and Computational Biology) by Uri Alon (Author) Thorough and accessible, this book presents the design principles of biological systems, and highlights the recurring circuit elements that make up biological networks. It provides a simple mathematical framework which can be used to understand and even design biological circuits. The textavoids specialist terms, focusing instead on several well-studied biological systems that concisely demonstrate key principles. An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological...