Good book by a great science writer. Similar in subject matter to “What is Life?” But very different in tone, breadth, organization. ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53404245 ) some of the difference comes down to an older scientist vs a younger science writer. I think I enjoyed the Nurse book a little more, but I can easily imagine others might prefer the Zimmer. If you’re interested in the basics of biology, and what exactly separates life from non-life, then either book is great. Delighted to have had the opportunity to read them both. ( )

Well, he's a better talker than writer. Heard him on a science programme on the radio and he communicated beautifully, but this book just doesn't work for me. It's really choppy, too many anecdotes about the history of the study of life and not enough detail about more recent scientific endeavours. OK if you don't know much about the subject I guess. ( )

Interesting tour of scientific theories of life and what the boundary conditions are. Crystals “grow” but we’re pretty sure they’re not alive, but what are the actual requirements for life? For example, a dried-out human being can’t be revived with water, but a dried-out tardigrade can be—it exists in a state of cryptobiosis, between life and death. What about reproduction? Well, Amazon mollies are a species that can only reproduce by interacting with other fish—two Amazon mollies can’t reproduce! ( )

I love popular accounts of science, and Carl Zimmer is an excellent and lively writer. His first story is about "radiobes", a mistaken finding in 1905 of complex structures formed by putting radium in beef broth. The thorough destruction of this idea occurred within a year. He visits a lab growing brain "organoids". These are balls of brain cells in culture that make internal connections and can even generate electrical signals. His next conundrum is defining when life begins in the human fetus, a subject we all know is controversial. He visits a herpetologist, writing about the wholesale and amazing transformation of metabolism as a python digests its prey. Slime molds can find the way through a maze, just by favoring growth towards food and cutting off branches that are not productive. Tardigrades can survive without water, drying out and coating their proteins in an organic glass. The tardigraves are in a chapter about brain death, and the evidence that primates know about death. He describes the problem with the "white nose" disease of bats as a failure of homeostasis between the hibernating bat and its cave. . Evolution can be demonstrated in a simple process of transferring microbeads coated with pseudomonas to new cells over a few days, favoring the cells that form biofilms. The same process occurs in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients. Hydra, discovered in about 1740, can regrow an entire body from bits, and vitalist scientists began to speculate that life arose in the deep ocean, in the urschleim, or primal slime. This led to dredging of ooze and the false creature bathybius, a slime that developed on samples of deep sea mud preserved in alcohol. In the end, the slime was gypsum reacting with alcohol. There is a brief biography of Albert Szent-Gyorgi, winner of the Nobel for discovering how muscles contract, but also a founder of speculation about the origin of life. Crick and Watson, Max Delbruck, and Erwin Schrodinger put the basis of life on a molecular footing.
At this point, Zimmer gives a lyrical brief history of the corona virus epidemic, as he considers if viruses are alive. At the end of the book, he describes microsomes or thermal vents, as possibly the origins of life, but blue droplets of oil and alcohol produced by a machine can also seem alive.
Altogether, fascinating, and readable in two days.
Learnings:
Maple seeds are called "samaras" and that the maple lineage is 60 million years old
The name corona virus comes from the resemblence of the spike proteins projecting through the virus coat resembles the corona of the sun
Saturn's moon Enceladus has a frozen crust over an ocean 20 miles deep, that is warmed by gravitational pull, and sends jets of methane and water vapor into space.
Cotard's syndrome describes people who are convinced that they have died, and it may occur with damage to the insula. ( )

Summary: An exploration of how scientists attempt (and have failed) to define what life is and the quest to understand how life arose.

Philosophers talk about the meaning of life. Carl Zimmer offers us a glimpse into the world of scientists who are trying to define what is life. What is the definition of life and when can something be defined as alive? What about particles like viruses and prions that appear dead until they interact with other living matter? And how did life originate here, and has it in other places in our solar system and beyond?

Zimmer takes us on an exploratory tour of this question that begins in the Cavendish Laboratory in 1904 with John Butler Burke who believed he had created the missing link between inorganic and organic life when he released grains of radium into a sterile broth and discovered under a microscope that shapes were there and were dividing. He called them radiobes and he believed that the radium provided the “vital flux” to turn the constituent elements into blobs of protoplasm. Eventually, he was disproven by other scientists after enjoying fleeting fame.

Zimmer takes us through the history of research on life from van Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries of microscopic life, to the growth of neural networks in laboratories. We go with him to pools near the mouths of volcanoes where some think organic life developed to discussions with researchers studying vents in the ocean. We enter caves to learn of the homeostatic relationship between hibernating bats and parasites who live off them and can kill them if they draw too much energy from the bat. We read of research demonstrating the lifelessness of soil samples on Mars and a meteorite from Mars that may evidence signs of life. I learned that red blood cells have no chromosomes and cannot divide and multiply like other cells.

Zimmer recounts the efforts of scientists to re-create the conditions under which they think life arose, whether it is in forming a strand of RNA or figuring out how to form a lipid membrane of the sort that surround every cell. Some scientists believe that the constituents of life have to come together fast, within 10,000 hours, because of the entropic forces that would destroy the constituents. That leads some to believe that they will achieve this in the next ten years.

In the end, he comes back to the question of the definition of life, cataloging the many scientists have proposed. He introduces us to Carol Cleland, a philosopher of scientist who thinks the whole enterprise is flawed and that what is needed is not a definition of life but a theory of life that helps us understand what life is.

As one reads Zimmer’s account, one realizes what is so fascinating in this quest to understand life and how it is possible. Zimmer introduces us to so many forms of life and the wonder of a planet teaming with life from microbes to every other form of life including ourselves. Some religious believers dismiss this whole quest to understand life and its origins with a wave of the hand saying, “God did it.” I’m not so quick to dismiss these quests. I realize some see nothing beyond the physical reality. Others, and I include myself here, would recognize in every scientific discovery the wonders and wisdom of God. If someone replicates the physical processes by which life arose, I will be delighted rather than distraught. My faith doesn’t rest on the gaps in our knowledge remaining gaps.

Zimmer gives us a glimpse at the reality of science. He shows us both the amazing things we are learning about the world, and the questions that remain, some on which multiple generations of scientists will work. He shows us the mistakes, and the ways that continued research and the rigorous peer review processes of science correct those mistakes. He shows us the big questions and what we still don’t know. This is great science writing!

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss. The opinions I have expressed are my own. ( )