Plano Reads: Life’s Edge

We are reading Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer for the July Brown Bag Book Club, which meets on Thursday, July 25 at 12pm at Parr Library.

Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

Print | eBook | Audiobook

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?

Veteran readers will not be surprised that Zimmer’s conclusion describes efforts to create life in the laboratory, a process whose possibility was suggested a century ago and whose first and many subsequent attempts produced headlines and increasingly complex but lifeless organic material. The author leaves no doubt that this century’s dazzling advances in genetics, biochemistry, DNA and RNA manipulation, and lipid membrane formation will bring home the bacon. An ingenious case that the answers to life’s secrets are on the horizon. © Kirkus Reviews

From where did life emerge from non-living matter? If we were to look for life on another planet, how would we know we had found it? By profiling researchers working on these inquiries, Zimmer shows the complexity of reaching a single answer as each proposed definition has its edge cases that provide challenging counter-examples. VERDICT A fascinating and well-written mapping of the edges of biology, which will have broad appeal to nonscientists. © Library Journals LLC

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.