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What is life? Fifty years after physicist Erwin Schrodinger posed this question in his celebrated and inspiring book, the answer remains elusive. In The Way of the Cell, one of the world's most respected microbiologists draws on his wide knowledge of contemporary science to provide fresh insight into this intriguing and all-important question.
What is the relationship of living things to the inanimate realm of chemistry and physics? How do lifeless but special chemicals come together to form those intricate dynamic ensembles that we recognize as life? To shed light on these questions, Franklin Harold focuses here on microorganisms--in particular, the supremely well-researched bacterium E. coli--because the cell is the simplest level of organization that manifests all the features of the phenomenon of life. Harold shows that as simple as they appear when compared to ourselves, every cell displays a dynamic pattern in space and time, orders of magnitude richer than its elements. It integrates the writhings and couplings of billions of molecules into a coherent whole, draws matter and energy into itself, constructs and reproduces its own order, and persists in this manner for numberless generations while continuously adapting to a changing world.
A cell constitutes a unitary whole, a unit of life, and in this volume one of the leading authorities on the cell gives us a vivid picture of what goes on within this minute precinct. The result is a richly detailed, meticulously crafted account of what modern science can tell us about life as well as one scientist's personal attempt to wring understanding from the tide of knowledge.
- Sales Rank: #176316 in Books
- Published on: 2003-06-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.00" h x 1.00" w x 9.10" l, 1.10 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780195163384
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Amazon.com Review
"What is life?" asked physicist Edwin Schrödinger in an influential essay by that title published half a century ago. In this book, Franklin Harold ventures no definitive answers about what he calls "the supreme marvel of the universe." Instead, with wit and learning, he surveys the advances in scientific understanding about the nature of life since Schrödinger's time.
Harold focuses closely on microorganisms, which, he observes, do not often figure in popular books of biology, perhaps because most general readers associate them only with disease and not with their many beneficial contributions to the world's workings. In fact, he suggests, the answer to Schrödinger's question is likely to be found at the microscopic level. Current evolutionary models derived from the study of ribosomal RNA from hundreds of species of plants and animals now point to the development of life from some cenancestor in a setting billions of years old, one in which "microorganisms rather than dinosaurs fill the horizon." The identity of that ancestor is not yet known, he writes; it may have resembled a bacterium, or it may have been a loosely organized assemblage of protocells "engaged in the promiscuous exchange of genetic information."
No matter what it looked like, Harold notes in this instructive survey of modern biological theory, life probably originated in an apparently inhospitable environment, as studies of deep-ocean thermal vents and the lithosphere now point to, rather than in the oceanic "chemical stew" of old. It's a fascinating story, and Harold tells it ably. --Gregory McNamee
From Booklist
Nothing concentrates the mind like tackling the largest of questions (What is life?) within the smallest of settings (the cell). In achieving this concentration, Harold invites general readers to join him on the very frontier of biological research, there to ponder the multilayered dynamics of the animate world. Though technical enough to discourage the casual browser, this explication of the inner workings of a humble bacterium initiates readers in just enough science to permit a serious engagement with fundamental theoretical questions: Where, for instance, does a strictly genetic approach to life lead us astray? Or, why must we invoke autopoiesis--and not just natural selection--in explaining biological order? Nonspecialists will find themselves richly rewarded for a little patience in following the careful and lucid answers to these and other fundamental questions. For Harold has cleared a path deep into the perplexities now confronting biological theorists. And with rare candor, he acknowledges when those perplexities push us to the limit of science, leaving us to wonder and guess. A work of marvelous penetration and scope. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"The work is like a breath of fresh air in a scientific world otherwise obsessed with excessive reductionism."--BioEssays
"Witty and erudite, this scientific book hails as a literary achievement. Comprehensive and up to date, Franklin Harold traces the roots--historical, thermodynamic, and biochemical--of today's biological revolution."--Lynn Margulis, co-author (with Dorion Sagan) of both What is Life? and What is Sex?
"This book helps us understand why the search for answers to the riddle 'What is life?' is a noble quest."--Howard C. Berg, author of Random Walks in Biology
Most helpful customer reviews
68 of 72 people found the following review helpful.
Superb natural philosophy of life with very current science
By Todd I. Stark
This is an excellent book of detailed biological philosophy that is often a sheer delight to read. I guess the best comparison I can think of off the top of my head is to Lewis Thomas' thought provoking "Lives of a Cell," but with extremely current science. This is particularly welcome in these days when we are being inundated with the pros and cons of genetics, the emphasis here is off of the genome itself and onto its role in constructing the cell and bringing life into being.
The cell is, to put it simply, the basic unit of life. This beautifully written book investigates the principles of what science knows about the cell, and also their limits. In so doing, it also investigates much of what we know about life. While it gets very detailed at times, it is still quite readable by educated non-specialists.
"Way of the Cell" makes judicious and consistent use of current state of the art principles such as self-organization, self-assembly, and the dynamics of far from equillibrium reactions, yet it doesn't get carried away with them. This book remains solidly rooted to science throughout, even when it probes the boundaries of what we know of the complex processes in living cells.
We are treated to several very interesting, measured, and contemporary accounts of the relationship of form and function, and how cells construct themselves. The author is very much a lyrical poet of nature philosophy as well as a serious biochemist. There are also a number of insights into the history and critical observations of biological science, but the book never becomes history-heavy. It is always foremost a book of wonderment at what science tells us about life.
There is a unique discussion of the origins of life, concluding that the answer lies in the utterly remote past, but with remarkable candor admitting that without novel and powerful methods of historical inquiry, we soon reach a limit to what we can discover about it with much certainty. This is followed by an epilogue about the meaning of life, and the author's personal view that science must remain silent on matters of morality.
This is a book that brings evolution, thermodynamics, information theory, developmental biology, cell biology, and genetics into close and comfortable conjunction, and even a fair degree of synthesis in spots. There are many profound insights here to be gleaned, and even more distinctive new perspectives on old ideas. There is an awful lot of "new wine in old bottles" here in the way the authors approach each topic. There are very few extremes or excessive claims here to criticize, it just all fits together wonderfully.
This is a book that will be particularly appreciated by those who enjoy Lynn Margulis' "system" perspective on organisms, but I think it should be read by anyone interested in deep questions of the nature of life from the perspective of science.
Contents:
Schrodinger's Riddle
The Quality of Life
Cells in Nature and Theory
Molecular Logic
A (almost) Comprehensible Cell
It Takes A Cell to Make A Cell
Morphogenesis: Where Form and Function Meet
The Advance of Microbes
By Descent with Modification
So What is Life ?
Searching for the Beginning
Epilogue
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
Difficult, profound; worth the reader's best efforts
By Dennis Littrell
Time and again in this dense, intensely scientific exposition on cellular life, Professor Harold expresses his dissatisfaction with what he calls the "genocentric" view of life. Instead he would like to see a "focus on the cellular templet rather than the molecular gene." He believes this would represent "a significant divergence from the genocentric conception of life that now dominates the scientific literature and even more so, the popular press." (p. 100) Harold makes a strong case for his point of view; indeed, it is this book more than any other that has made me see the overriding influence the immediate molecular environment has on reproduction and growth.
The genome has its "recipe," its code of instructions, but what Harold is at pains to tell us is that without the four-dimensional cellular environment in which the gene's "instructions" are carried out in a step-by-step process, there would be no growth or reproduction.
What this means is that the shape and temperature, the position and abundance of the surrounding cellular elements themselves shape the genetic expression as much as or even more than the genome. All life comes from life. All cells come from cells. There is no acting out of the genetic code outside a cellular environment.
And so we see Harold's frustration and that of other molecular biologists at all the hoopla that has accompanied the sequencing of the genome when it is clear that reading the code is just a very small step toward understanding how the cell reproduces itself and grows. What we need to understand is the intricate environment of the cell and how it interacts with the code leading to the epigenetic assembly of the cell and ultimately of the organism. The complications inherent in such an enterprise are truly mind-boggling in the extreme. Analysis of the four-dimensional factors would overwhelm the fastest computers in existence--all of them at the same time--if somehow we could figure out how to employ them to aid our analysis.
These facts explain why scientists like Harold are insistent upon a holistic approach to biology and why they again and again warn about the limitations of a reductionist approach. Life is just too complicated to be understood by breaking it down into pieces and attempting to put it back together, or to reverse engineer it.
On page 213 there is an interesting comparison of E. O. Wilson's view that there is "progress" in evolution and Stephen J. Gould's emphatic view that there is not. Harold seems to be implying that because organisms have become more complex that there is indeed at least "direction" in evolution. I would go further than this and observe that the rise of complex culture-bearing organisms like humans, who may be able to protect their home planet from a death-dealing meteor, implies if not "progress" in evolution, something equally agreeable. However, I would not say that our rise was inevitable. Indeed, along with Gould I would call it a contingency.
Much of the book, especially chapters three through eight, is a technical exploration of the microbial world of the cell using concepts and terminology not readily accessible to the lay reader. Harold is aware of this, at least for Chapter 4, "Molecular Logic," where he writes on page 35, "...students of biochemistry will find little in [the chapter]...that is new to them, but for the layman it may be like sipping water from a firehose." (!) Professor Harold provides a glossary, but one suspects one is out of one's depth when the words searched for are not in the glossary, but can be found in an ordinary dictionary!
Nonetheless the broad outlines of Harold's message can be discerned without appreciating fully the intricacies of cell metabolism and development. The introductory chapters, "Schrödinger's Riddle" and "The Quality of Life" explore the question that physicist Erwin Schrödinger famously asked in his much admired little book, What Is Life? (1944), a book that very much impressed the young Franklin Harold. In the closing chapters, beginning with Chapter 9 "By Descent with Modification," and especially the engaging Chapter 10 "So What is Life?", Harold looks more generally at evolution. He touches on the new science of complexity and how it relates to biology, and on the thermodynamics of ecosystems and how that affects natural selection. His treatment of some of the controversies in evolutionary theory is both illuminating and balanced, so much so that one would like to quote whole passages. This is obviously a subject Professor Harold has thought long and hard about for many years. Here are some examples of his thought:
"...[F]orm is not directly or rigidly determined by the genotype: the genes define a range within which the phenotype falls, but forms arise epigenetically as the result of developmental processes." (p. 209)
"Organisms are historical creatures, the products of evolution; we should not expect to deduce all their properties from universal laws." (p. 218)
"What we lack is an understanding of the principles that ultimately make living organisms living, and in their absence we cannot hope to integrate the phenomenon of life into the familiar framework of physical law. I am not here to advocate a veiled vitalism, nor to sneak in a creator by the back door. But...until we have forged rational links between the several domains of science, our understanding of life will remain incomplete and even superficial." (p. 218)
"...[W]hile a machine implies a machine maker, an organism is a self-organizing entity." (p. 220)
"Organisms process matter and energy as well as information; each represents a dynamic node in a whirlpool of several currents, and self-reproduction is a property of the collective, not of genes.... DNA is a peculiar sort of software, that can only be correctly interpreted by its own unique hardware.... [S]ending aliens the genome of a cat is no substitute for sending the cat itself--complete with mice." (p. 221)
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Eloquent tribute to the mystique of Biology.
By Luigi Fernandez
The way of the cell is the way of life, for the cell is the structural unit of all living organisms on Earth. And Franklin Harold comes close to defining life in a manner that is all-encompassing, concise, and eloquent. Any person who has taken a Biology class should not have a problem with the book, although many times the author uses terminology that does not get defined at the same time, in which case, the reader has to have a good background in Cell Biology or has to browse the glossary.
Harold's eloquence is remarkable. Consider the following quotes:
1. "Over time functional systems would have "crystallized" into successful configurations, and therefore become less receptive to the import of novelty..."
2. "The genetic free-trade zone fragmented into protected enclaves, not abruptly but gradually on a time-scale of millions of years..."
3. "...leaving a huge lacuna in any account of cell evolution, but fostering a crop of stimulating conjectures."
4. "Molecular phylogenists, who draw their opinions from the bedrock of gene sequences, view the matter somewhat differently but still in a glass, darkly."
5. "The better part of valor may be to sit tight and await the tide of new data, but only dullards are proof against the temptations of myth-making."
6. "There is a fine air of whimsy, about those imaginative tales ...They also stop insouciantly around patches of quicksand, such as what brought about early cellular fusions that are not permitted to contemporary prokaryotes..."
7. "The profusion that came after is built like a fugue upon the deep theme of eukaryotic order."
8. "On the outer banks of science, one often suspects that the believer is happy while the doubter is wise; and yet, too critical a spirit is apt to overlook the genuine contribution that complexity studies have already made."
9. "The rocky path from RNA replicators to DNA genes and from catalytic RNA to protein enzymes calls for stout boots and a good head for heights."
This makes for engrossing reading, as the mystique of Biology can be overlooked when the text is dry and scholarly. There is delight, however, in reading Harold, similar to what the reader can get from Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Stuart Kauffman, to name a few. I can imagine Harold entertaining his audience in a seminar with his penchant for combining words elegantly.
Today I was in a seminar where a famous molecular biologist (also a cancer biologist) admitted to a sabotage against the reductionist agenda as more scientists begin to realize that life processes cannot be just explained by the panoply of bioorganic molecules, proteins especially, and the genes that encode them. Harold fiercely stresses that DNA, for all the glorification that it deserves, is not all there is. New properties emerge as biological molecules find themselves in different cellular compartments and environments, at different stages in the development of the organism, and as the organisms themselves explore all possibilities of trading and swapping genes, and even fusing their entire bodies in one. Read this book, and be enveloped by the biological mystique!
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