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Author Lane, Nick, 1967- author.

Title Transformer : the deep chemistry of life and death / Nick Lane.

Publication Info. New York, N.Y. : W.W. Norton, 2022.
©2022

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  572 LAN    Check Shelf
 Newington, Lucy Robbins Welles Library - Adult Department  572 LANE    Check Shelf
 West Hartford, Noah Webster Library - Non Fiction  572 LANE    Check Shelf
Edition First American edition.
Description 390 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-367) and index.
Contents Introduction: Life itself -- 1. Discovering the nanocosm -- 2. The path of carbon --3. From gases to life --4. Revolutions -- 5. To the dark side -- 6. The flux capacitor -- Epilogue: Self -- Envoi: 'Like Most Revelations'
Summary "A renowned biochemist's illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life. What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end? For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight -- how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise. 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. Lane reveals the beautiful, violent world within our cells, where hydrogen atoms are stripped from the carbon skeletons of food and fed to the ravenous beast of oxygen. Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse, also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of life on our planet. Now it does both. How can the same pathway create and destroy? What might our study of the Krebs cycle teach us about the mysteries of aging and the hardest problem of all, consciousness? Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our cells -- what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the origin of life. Enlivened by Lane's talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone fascinated by biology's great mysteries. Life is at root a chemical phenomenon: this is its deep logic."-- Provided by publisher
Subject Krebs cycle.
Death (Biology)
Cells -- Aging.
Biology.
Chemistry.
SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Biochemistry.
SCIENCE / Chemistry / Organic.
SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Cell Biology.
Biology. (OCoLC)fst00832383
Cells -- Aging. (OCoLC)fst00850252
Chemistry. (OCoLC)fst00853344
Death (Biology) (OCoLC)fst00888690
Krebs cycle. (OCoLC)fst00989115
ISBN 9780393651485 (hardcover)
0393651487 (hardcover)
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