Life's Edge
The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
(Sprache: Englisch)
"Carl Zimmer is one of the best science writers we have today."
-Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world-from protocells to brains, from...
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"Carl Zimmer is one of the best science writers we have today."
-Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world-from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses-the harder they find it is to locate life's edge.
Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can't answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society's most charged conflicts-whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.
Life's Edge is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could craft. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to re-create life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply. Have they made life in the lab?
Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all
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the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.
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Lese-Probe zu „Life's Edge “
The Way the Spirit Comes to the BonesAs I made my way down a hairpin road, a sage-brush-studded wall of sand to my right, I felt keenly aware of my own life. I could feel the steep slope in my legs. After a series of tight turns, the wall swung away, revealing a long, desolate beach. It ran northward, a corridor of coast between high, slumping cliffs and the sea. Out over the Pacific, the sun hid behind clouds, a sky-wide bank of white. Earlier that day, in my hotel room, my phone had informed me the sky was cloudy and the temperature was in the low seventies. My brain responded to that information by choosing a light, long-sleeved shirt for my walk to the beach. And now my brain was updating its decision without cc'ing my conscious self.
Nerves sprinkled throughout my skin sensed the humidity and temperature of the layer of air encasing my body. Voltage spikes traveled from the nerve endings along long branches known as dendrites until they reached the cores of the nerves, called the somas. From there, new signals raced onward along long, cable-shaped extensions called axons. The axons reached my spine and traveled up toward my head. From neuron to neuron, the signals from the outside world made their way into my brain and finally to a nub of neurons deep inside my skull.
Those neurons combined the Morse code readout from across my body to generate new, different signals. They carried commands instead of sensations. The new voltage spikes left my brain along outward-bound axons, through my brain stem and down my spinal cord, until they reached millions of glands in my skin. There, they created electric charges in twisted tubes that wrung water out of the surrounding cells. Sweat ran down my back.
My conscious self was annoyed with the brain that generated it. One of the few shirts I had brought with me was now drenched in salt water.. I could not actually sense the trill of voltage spikes
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that shuttled information from skin to brain. I didn't feel a surge of blood in the center of my head as the heat-regulating part of my brain swung into action. In the moment, by the sea, I simply felt myself sweating. I felt annoyed. I felt alive.
As I felt aware of my own life, I also recognized other lives on the beach. A man walked lazily south, carrying a white-and-blue surfboard. Far to the north, a paraglider launched off from the top of the cliffs. The corkscrewing of the yellow paraglider wing spoke of intentions that arose in some human's brain and produced signals to hands gripping brake handles.
Along with human life, I could see feathered life as well. Sandpipers skittered along the surf. Their seed-sized brains sensed the flash of incoming waves and the cold foam around their legs, contracting muscles to keep their bodies upright, to scuttle to higher ground, to poke the sand for buried snails. The snails didn't quite have brains but rather fretworks of nerves that produced signals of their own for slowly, relentlessly burying their bodies into the earth. I contemplated the thousands of other subterranean nervous systems inside the mud dragons and the Pismo clams and other creatures buried below my feet. Out in the ocean, down the underwater canyon, other brains were swimming, carried along inside the buoyant bodies of leopard sharks and stingrays while the nerve nets of jellyfish drifted by.
After a few minutes of walking along the water, I stopped and looked down. A gigantic neuron, six feet long, lay on the sand. Most of it was made up of a glistening, caramel-colored axon. It curved gently like a heavily insulated electric cable. At one end it swelled into a bulb-shaped soma, which was crowned in turn by branches of dendrites. It could have been all that survived from a kraken that died in a battle with a pod of killer whales somewhere between here and Hawaii.
This fantastical neuron was, in fact, a stalk of elk kelp.
As I felt aware of my own life, I also recognized other lives on the beach. A man walked lazily south, carrying a white-and-blue surfboard. Far to the north, a paraglider launched off from the top of the cliffs. The corkscrewing of the yellow paraglider wing spoke of intentions that arose in some human's brain and produced signals to hands gripping brake handles.
Along with human life, I could see feathered life as well. Sandpipers skittered along the surf. Their seed-sized brains sensed the flash of incoming waves and the cold foam around their legs, contracting muscles to keep their bodies upright, to scuttle to higher ground, to poke the sand for buried snails. The snails didn't quite have brains but rather fretworks of nerves that produced signals of their own for slowly, relentlessly burying their bodies into the earth. I contemplated the thousands of other subterranean nervous systems inside the mud dragons and the Pismo clams and other creatures buried below my feet. Out in the ocean, down the underwater canyon, other brains were swimming, carried along inside the buoyant bodies of leopard sharks and stingrays while the nerve nets of jellyfish drifted by.
After a few minutes of walking along the water, I stopped and looked down. A gigantic neuron, six feet long, lay on the sand. Most of it was made up of a glistening, caramel-colored axon. It curved gently like a heavily insulated electric cable. At one end it swelled into a bulb-shaped soma, which was crowned in turn by branches of dendrites. It could have been all that survived from a kraken that died in a battle with a pod of killer whales somewhere between here and Hawaii.
This fantastical neuron was, in fact, a stalk of elk kelp.
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Autoren-Porträt von Carl Zimmer
Carl Zimmer writes the Matter column for The New York Times and has frequently contributed to The Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American. He has won the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Journalism Award three times, among a host of other awards and fellowships. He teaches science writing at Yale, has been a guest on NPR's RadioLab, Science Friday, and Fresh Air, and maintains an international speaking schedule. He is the author of thirteen books about science, including She Has Her Mother's Laugh.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Carl Zimmer
- 2021, 368 Seiten, Maße: 16,3 x 23,6 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Verlag: Dutton
- ISBN-10: 0593182715
- ISBN-13: 9780593182710
- Erscheinungsdatum: 17.03.2021
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Stories that both dazzle and edify particularly brilliant in telling the story of DNA Zimmer is an astute, engaging writer inserting the atmospheric anecdote where applicable, drawing out a scientific story and bringing laboratory experiments to life. This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself. It is about error and hubris, but also about wonder and the reach of science. Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times Book Review
[Zimmer] embraces the question of what it means to be alive explicitly and with the enthusiasm of an accomplished and successful storyteller. Zimmer has crafted an eminently readable tale, told through the stories and personal anecdotes of the scientists who have devoted their research to defining the essence of life.
Issues in Science and Technology
The pleasures of Life s Edge derive from its willingness to sit with the ambiguities it introduces, instead of pretending to conclusively transform the senseless into the sensible.
The Washington Post
A fascinating and well-written mapping of the edges of biology, which will have broad appeal to nonscientists.
Library Journal (starred review)
Diligently tackles the true definition of life... Zimmer invites us to observe, ponder, and celebrate life's exquisite diversity, nuances, and ultimate unity.
Booklist (starred review)
A master science writer explores the definition of life... An ingenious case that the answers to life's secrets are on the horizon.
Kirkus Reviews
From the struggle to define when life begins and ends to the hunt for how life got started, [Life's Edge] offers an engaging, in-depth look at some of biology s toughest questions.
Science News
Carl Zimmer shows what a great suspense novel science can be. Life's Edge is a timely exploration in an age when modern Dr. Frankensteins are hard at work, but Carl s artful, vivid, irresistible writing transcends the moment in these
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twisting chapters of intellectual revelation. Prepare to be enthralled.
Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Laureate, co-author of A Crack in Creation
Profound, lyrical, and fascinating, Life s Edge will give you a newfound appreciation for life itself. It is the work of a master science writer at the height of his skills a welcome gift at a time when life seems more precious than ever.
Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
Previously garnered praise for Carl Zimmer:
One of the best science writers we have today.
Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No one unravels the mysteries of science as brilliantly and compellingly.
David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon
Nobody writes about science better.
Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish
Carl Zimmer makes the complex science of heredity read like a novel.
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Laureate, co-author of A Crack in Creation
Profound, lyrical, and fascinating, Life s Edge will give you a newfound appreciation for life itself. It is the work of a master science writer at the height of his skills a welcome gift at a time when life seems more precious than ever.
Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
Previously garnered praise for Carl Zimmer:
One of the best science writers we have today.
Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No one unravels the mysteries of science as brilliantly and compellingly.
David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon
Nobody writes about science better.
Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish
Carl Zimmer makes the complex science of heredity read like a novel.
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
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