How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

testing that approach on a problem with a known solution. He set out to see if the methodology generally used in biology would work to show how a transistor radio works. How would that approach generally go? First, he wrote, researchers would persuade funders to let them buy a stack of radios that all work the same way, which they will dissect and

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All the same, Berzelius added a fruitful notion. Rather than postulate some “vital force”—“a word to which we can affix no idea”—we should recognize that “this power to live belongs not to the constituent parts of our bodies, nor does it belong to them as an instrument, neither is it a simple power; but the result of the mutual operation of the ins

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The COVID vaccines, especially in the rapidity of their creation and testing, have been one of the greatest triumphs of modern science. And yet in some ways we seem little better off than we were in the Middle Ages, seeking medicines (including COVID antivirals) largely by trial and error, and having to hope that, if we’re infected, our god or blin

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Just as there are physicists who will tell you that everything that happens can ultimately be explained by physics alone (it can’t), and chemists who tell you that in the end biology is just chemistry (it isn’t), so by asserting the primacy of the gene, geneticists are establishing an intellectual pecking order when they attribute more to genes tha

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One of the fundamental messages of this book is that we cannot properly understand how life works through analogies or metaphorical comparison with any technology that humans have ever invented (so far). Such analogies may provide a foothold for our understanding, but in the end they will fall short, and will constrain and even mislead us if we don

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Favored metaphors change over time, but—and this is less often appreciated—that does not simply mean that one supplants the other. The concept of “vitalism” might be traced back to the Aristotelian soul and is generally regarded as obsolete in biology today, but in fact we’ll see that it still survives in cryptic forms, most particularly in the way

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There is, then, no unique place to look for the answer to how life works. Life is a hierarchical process, and each level has its own rules and principles: there are those that apply to genes, and to proteins, to cells and tissues and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system. All are essential; none can claim primacy. As Nobel l

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Lazebnik argued that biology is using the wrong language—a qualitative and sometimes personalized picture of “this component speaks to that one,” rather than the true circuit diagram of an electrical engineer. Lazebnik’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek paper made an extremely pertinent observation: the modus operandi of much of experimental biology might

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the notion of a gene has partially filled a void exposed by social change. We are in, they said, “a time when individual identity, family connections, and social cohesion seem threatened and the social contract appears in disarray.” Perhaps society has seized on a scientific idea that seemed to offer consolation when the traditional support of reli

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