Even though nonscientists won’t be able to judge whether Lane makes a convincing case, he is periodically quite clear on his goals. Early on, he posits the essential question as “genes first or metabolism first? The thrust of this book is that energy is primal — energy flow shapes genetic information.” Later, he restates the proposition with added whimsy: Hugely ambitious and tremendously exciting ... Transformer shows how a molecular dance from the dawn of time still sculpts our lives today. I read with rapt attention’ I thought the best part of the book was how the author detailed the scientists’ quest to discover those elusive secrets. I also quite enjoyed the appendix and source material that he used. Rather than just a list of articles and books, the author took the time to review most of the research material in detail, giving the reader many starting points should they wish to further investigate the subject on their own.

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.This is probably the best book on biology (and more specifically biochemistry) that I've ever read. Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle—and its reverse—why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today. Every life sciences major remembers learning about the Krebs cycle in college; if your undergraduate experience was anything like mine, then you also remember forgetting it immediately. When we learn about this cycle at the heart of metabolism, it’s presented almost exclusively in the context of energy production. Producing ATP is important, but so is generating the macromolecules that come to constitute tissues and organs. Metabolism does both, utilizing the Krebs cycle as a sort of roundabout to accomplish the needs of the cell. Lane’s foundation for his function-before-form theory seems to be that that cellular process — what’s known as the Krebs cycle — can run in both directions, meaning the cells of some animals are capable of building up materials, not just breaking them down. This somehow leads to the conclusion that these cells had metabolism before they contained genetic information.

Early theories of the origin of life included spontaneous generation from non-living matter and panspermia, the arrival of life on earth from other bodies in space. [5] The question of how life originated became urgent when Charles Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species became widely accepted by biologists. The evolution of new species by splitting off from older ones implied that all life forms were derived from a few such forms, perhaps only one, as Darwin had suggested at the end of his book. [6] Darwin suggested that life could have originated in some "warm little pond" containing a suitable mixture of chemical compounds. [7] The question has continued to be debated into the 21st century. [8] [9] [10] [11] I’ve used the word flux a few times already, and I’ll use it again throughout the book. Before getting any further, let’s pause for a moment to clarify exactly what I mean by it. Flux is a form of flow, but with one crucial difference. Water can flow in a river, or traffic down a street. What goes in at one end and what comes out at the other is the same thing – water, or cars. In biochemistry, flux is the flow of things that are trans- formed along the way. Imagine a car entering a street; let’s say it’s a VW Beetle. No sooner has it gone ten yards down than there’s a blinding flash and it abruptly turns into a Porsche. Then another flash and it’s become a Volvo. Bang! It’s a white van. Zap! Now it’s a minibus. Flash! It’s a tractor, which leaves the street. But the strangest thing about this street is that the same thing keeps on happening: only VW Beetles ever enter the street; only tractors ever leave. The same succession of trans- formations takes place each time. Let’s imagine that sixty VW Beetles enter the street every minute, one per second. Each of them is transformed in a series of blinding flashes into sixty tractors. That’s flux: the total number of vehicles that passes down the street, each one transformed into the same type of tractor. Of course, that’s just this street. Take a look at the street around the corner. There you’ll see only Vespa scooters entering, transforming into Harley motorbikes. And just across town there’s a canal where canoes change into speed boats. But as soon as you have multiple tissues, you can do things in parallel. You can balance what this tissue is doing with what that tissue is doing. You can’t do energy and biosynthesis equally at the same time very easily — it’s easier to do one or the other. That kind of forces us to have different metabolisms in different tissues.

Lane is British and makes no concessions to American English. Experiments work “first go,” not first try. We fly in aeroplanes and put on jumpers instead of sweaters. And in the fall, perhaps we engage in a programme of maths or simply enjoy the tonne of colours in the trees. ageing, related diseases and cancer newly explained as consequences of slowing and reversing the Krebs cycle Transformer is a monstrous tome. And it's even more of a chimera in audiobook form. Having read the author's previous book, The Vital Question, I knew a bit of what to expect, a high-level explanation of an important biochemical process, with all the history, false starts, important scientists and, most crucially, the chemistry behind it.

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.” 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.

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Perhaps the only real critique I can make of the book regards the bit at the end about consciousness. Lane’s presentation of the hard problem of consciousness, as well as his argument for electric fields as a causative agent of consciousness, warranted more of a footnote than an epilogue. His arguments here weren’t particularly strong, and I almost think he’d be the first to admit this. When I saw this book being offered up on NetGalley, I was particularly interested in the subject, having majored in Biology/Human Anatomy and Physiology in college. Besides, the Kreb’s Cycle (and my favorite organelle, the mighty mitochondria) is one of the most important processes in the human body, one that provides the energy that allows it to hum along. The gerontology community has been talking along these lines for 10 to 20 years. The greatest risk factor for age-related diseases isn’t mutations; it’s being old. If we could solve the underlying process of aging, then we could cure most age-related diseases. It seems tantalizingly simple in many respects. Are we really going to suddenly live to 120 or 800? I don’t see it happening sometime soon. But then the question is, why not? Why do we age? What causes the mounting cellular damage? 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.

Clearly, this is a book filled with big ideas, many of which are bold instances of lateral thinking. Lane says he doesn’t expect to be right about all of it, but that is fine – even the bits that are wrong will advance our knowledge in the disproving. Wachtershauser, G. (1 January 1990). "Evolution of the first metabolic cycles". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 87 (1): 200–204. Bibcode: 1990PNAS...87..200W. doi: 10.1073/pnas.87.1.200. PMC 53229. PMID 2296579. Now, in contrast, there was this mysterious group of simple organisms called the Ediacaran fauna. They lived about 200 meters deep in the ocean and fell extinct right before the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago, when oxygen levels in the environment fell. The Ediacaran fauna didn’t have much tissue differentiation, and they could only do one thing biochemically at a time. When oxygen levels fell right before the Cambrian, they couldn’t adapt to the new environments.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. In anoxygenic photosynthesis, chlorophyll is used to strip electrons from H2S which are then passed onto ferredoxin directly. The waste product is not oxygen but sulfur. The huge advantage here is that the sun now powers the transfer of electrons, without the need for burning fuel to power pumping. The disadvantage is that these bacteria still derive all their electrons from geological sources such as volcanoes and hydrothermal vents. An exhilarating account of the biophysics of life, stretching from the first stirrings of living matter to the psychology of consciousness. I felt as if I was there, every step of the way’