作者简介

Nick Lane is a professor of evolutionary biology at University College London and an award-winning author of five books. He is the codirector of UCL’s Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE) and lives in London, England.

内容简介

From the renowned biochemist and author of The Vital Question, an 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.


Nick Lane is a professor of evolutionary biology at University College London and an award-winning author of five books. He is the codirector of UCL’s Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE) and lives in London, England.

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豆瓣评论

  • bingo
    物质 能量不知是不是有些错觉,感觉作者行文风格变化不少04-17
  • optman
    对于生命,基因并不能决定一切,还需要关注微观的生化反应细节,尤其是有关物质和能量代谢的克氏循环!决定细胞生长的,除了细胞核的基因,还包括微环境(细胞内液)。生命的本质是化学反应,但是化学反应的方向取决于反应物的浓度。它可以正向进行,也可以反向进行。癌症,不管什么基因变异导致的,最终表现就是代谢异常,本该全力走一圈的克氏循环中途卡壳了往另一个分支进行,导致ATP产生不足,而细胞过量繁殖。衰老的原因不是累积的基因变异,而是线粒体效率下降,导致一连串的信号连锁错配,生物体高效的内循环平衡被打破,而不能高效运行。运动可以更多的消耗ATP,保持克氏循环流顺畅,这样更健康!06-04
  • 梁哼利
    看到18%,门槛很高,很难读下去了01-22
  • FTY
    Life is controlled flow of energy. FeS2 rock surface and deep sea hydro-thermo vent proton gradient triggered ancient carbon fixation. A cycle is auto-catalytic. Reverse Kreb’s cycle formed. O2 level rose. Kreb’s cycle and Calvin cycle thrived. Eat well, exercise more, and spin Kreb’s cycle!03-04
  • hehe
    Delphic oracles "know thyself, nothing to excess, surety brings ruin."11-10

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