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What Is Life?: Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology, by Ed Regis
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In 1944, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger published a groundbreaking little book called What Is Life? In fewer than one hundred pages, he argued that life was not a mysterious or inexplicable phenomenon, as many people believed, but a scientific process like any other, ultimately explainable by the laws of physics and chemistry. Today, more than sixty years later, members of a new generation of scientists are attempting to create life from the ground up. Science has moved forward in leaps and bounds since Schrödinger's time, but our understanding of what does and does not constitute life has only grown more complex. An era that has already seen computer chip-implanted human brains, genetically engineered organisms, genetically modified foods, cloned mammals, and brain-dead humans kept "alive" by machines is one that demands fresh thinking about the concept of life. While a segment of our national debate remains stubbornly mired in moral quandaries over abortion, euthanasia, and other "right to life" issues, the science writer Ed Regis demonstrates how science can and does provide us with a detailed understanding of the nature of life. Written in a lively and accessible style, and synthesizing a wide range of contemporary research, What Is Life? is a brief and illuminating contribution to an age-old debate.
- Sales Rank: #2142362 in Books
- Published on: 2008-04-01
- Released on: 2008-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.46" h x .86" w x 5.69" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
From Publishers Weekly
As scientists come closer to creating artificial life, the very definition of life is ever more elusive. Science writer Regis (The Biology of Doom) tackles this large issue and more in a book that never quite finds its focus. By selecting the same title as Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger's 1945 classic and Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan's 2000 offering, Regis self-consciously situates his book as a response to theirs. He is, however, no more successful than they were in answering the central question, though he proposes cell metabolism as the best definition we currently have. Regis discusses current attempts to use new techniques to create entities that could be considered living, but he fails to tell a compelling story about either the progress being made or the medical implications of these efforts. Instead, he heads off on several well-traveled tangents presenting relatively simple explanations of how we've come to our understanding of DNA, basic metabolic pathways and evolutionary biology. Although he touches on the fact that being able to distinguish animate from inanimate entities is of critical philosophical importance for debates over such issues as abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia, he never does more than scratch the surface of any of these topics. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
To the question posed in the title, science writer Regis provides this answer: an embodied metabolism. The title honors the 1944 science classic by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, of wave/particle duality fame. When Schrödinger posed the question, he meant to set an agenda––DNA had not yet been identified as the genetic carrier molecule. Regis’ purpose in asking it seems motivated by the incipient creation of life from scratch, and, putting aside the ethics and biological danger of this portentous landmark in human history, seeks to furnish informed readers with a framework for deciding for themselves when scientists have crossed the finish line. Setting the tone by profiling a team running the artificial-life race, Regis presents their research program for bringing up baby, then reverts to a historical summary of the revolution in molecular biology. Covering its major discoveries, Regis devotes as much time to metabolism as to the more glamorous DNA story. Venturing that aliveness is more a philosophical than a scientific matter, Regis offers timely preparation for thought about big science headlines to come. --Gilbert Taylor
Review
“Ed Regis is always a careful researcher, always an independent thinker. In this subversive little book, he shows that the biggest of big questions is still worth asking—more urgently now than ever.” —David Quammen “Elegant, simple, clear, beautifully written. Regis takes up where Erwin Schrödinger left off and tackles the ultimate mystery of biology. This book is a scrumptious gem.” —Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone “A comprehensive and elegant analysis of the physical basis of life: an up-to-date successor to Schrodinger’s 1944 book.” —Marvin Minsky, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, M.I.T., and author of The Emotion Machine Praise for The Biology of Doom: “[An] engaging expose ... entertaining and informative ... the best account yet of U.S. research and efforts to produce biological weapons.” —Washington Post Book World “Ed Regis has dug around in the roots of bioweaponry and unearthed a fascinating tale.” —Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A popular-science writer explores basic questions
By Roy E. Perry
In 1944, Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger published a book with the same name as the current volume: "What Is Life?"
Popular science writer Ed Regis points out that Schroedinger "wanted to challenge the notion that at the core of life was some impalpable excrescence that lay beyond the grasp of science."
This optimistic view holds that life can be explained in the same terms, and by the same laws of physics and chemistry, as those that pertain to everything else in nature. To be sure, life is exceptional, but it is rule-governed and law-abiding; there is nothing inherently magical or mystical about it. Ultimately, scientists will be able to unravel all of life's mysteries.
Present-day scientists are not so sanguine. The question, "What Is life?", Regis suggests, lies more in the realm of religion, philosophy, and metaphysics--and by extension, politics and ethics--than in the realm of science.
At first glance, a tangential approach to the question, "What is life?" promises a satisfying solution: "Unquestionably, if there was anything that appeared obvious about what it meant to be alive, it was possessing the ability to die."
One's hopeful expectations of an answer, however, are dashed by this consideration: There is no agreement concerning what death is. In between life and death there is often "a state of near-death, or pseudo-life."
If one insists on a scientific answer, Regis suggests the following, "Defining life as embodied metabolism . . . seems to be the most defensible theory we have at the present."
If you expect a definitive answer to the question "What is life?", this book will disappoint you.
Ed Regis holds a Ph.D. In philosophy from New York University and taught for many years at Howard University. He is now a full-time science writer, contributing to Scientific American, Harper's Magazine, Wired, Discover, and The New York Times, among other periodicals. He is the author of several books, including The Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Not much new in this short survey, but still valuable
By Wayne Lobb
I had hoped to get from this short book a probing, thoughtful, current answer to the title question, especially given the subtitle of "In the Age of Synthetic Biology". I was disappointed: this is a brief and generalized historical survey. The end footnotes and bibliographical references are valuable, though, for guided further reading.
Regis says that Schrödinger in 1943 "discreetly refrained from answering" the question. If so, then Regis has refrained as well. Here is how Schrödinger answered the question in 1943: "What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something', moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect of an inanimate piece of matter to 'keep going' under similar circumstances." I.e., metabolism and negative entropy over long stretches of time. Here is how Regis summarizes things 65 years later: "A reasonable answer ... seems to be: an embodied metabolism." Hardly different from Schrödinger, and less illuminating. Regis defines the essential term "embodied" only through a quote in a footnote buried at the end of the book: wrapped in a membrane, like a cell is.
To my mind, Regis is wrong and unfair to dismiss Margulis and Sagan's multiple, accumulating, descriptive answers in their 1995 book of the same title as being "figurative, flowery, or metaphorical ... entirely too many answers." Here is how Margulis and Sagan answer the fundamental question: "Life itself is these [metabolic] patterns of chemical conservation in a universe tending toward heat loss and disintegration", i.e. essentially the same definition as Schrödinger. They go further than Schrödinger, asserting that the cell is the smallest unit of life on Earth and that reproduction is a crucial feature of life on Earth.
Schrödinger addressed the question of what life ultimately amounts to from the standpoint of physics and chemistry. Margulis and Sagan addressed the question of what life on this planet actually is, from its core metabolic machinery up to the fullness of all living matter that we humans perceive. Left unaddressed is the question of what life HAS to be at a very minimum, not only to be manifestly alive on Earth for a generation like an infertile mule is, but to be able to persist and evolve, perhaps synthetically, for thousands or millions or billions of years in an environment that might not resemble Earth at all. Metabolism of some type appears to be mandatory, together with the ability to adapt to a changing environment whether through reproduction with random mutation or through some other mechanism.
Lest you think that synthetic life would be have to be uninteresting, take a look at robots that evolve altruistic behavior entirely on their own, by googling the phrase "Altruistic robots produced through evolution".
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Beyond Frankenstein - Polymath07 review
By Polymath07
The recent book by Ed Regis, "What is Life? Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology", may be considered the third of a series. In 1945, Edwin Schrodinger, of the "Schrodinger Equation" that can (with strenuous labor) calculate the properties of any atom's electron cloud, and whose eponymous Cat defines the dilemma of quantum phenomena in a macroscopic world, wrote "What is life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell", in which he did not answer the title question, but explored life phenomena from a strictly chemical and physical aspect. He predicted crucial aspects of the genetic code a decade or two in advance of their discovery. Then in 1995 Lynn Margulis brought certain of the same themes more up to date in "What is Life?", shortly thereafter revised and reprinted with her son Dorian Sagan as co-author. As Ed Regis reports, Margulis and Sagan answered the question in so many ways that it is not answered at all.
Author Regis begins his book with a look at the formation of a four-way consortium in 2002, with the aim of specifically creating a living cell not based on previously living matter. To date, the effort has not succeeded, but as Edison would have said, they are learning a great number of things that don't work...and a few that offer tantalizing clues to what might work. So much so, that the government is now interested, as evidenced by the Los Alamos Protocells web site (protocells.lanl.gov) and its link to protocell.org, a jumping-off place to a handful of major efforts in the Synthetic Life arena.
Regis does home in on an answer, a minimalist definition that life is "embodied metabolism". A few caveats are needed, such as a measure of autonomy and of self-repair, for example: An automobile consumes fuel and moves about, but does not direct its own motions nor maintain itself, while a portion of the metabolism of living cells goes to structural regeneration and growth. And "embodied" is needed to distinguish living matter from open flames.
More generally speaking, living things not only metabolize, they also reproduce and evolve. Not every individual will do so, but all can do so. And, specifically for all life that we know, all life processes are directed by coded instructions. DNA carries the instructions, while RNA plus proteins carry them out. Synthetic cells could be based on DNA, RNA and proteins, or it could instead use different chemistry, perhaps not even based on carbon. But whenever a wholly synthetic "embodied metabolism" gets cranked up, performing as cells perform, I suppose we'll have to dub it "living".
This is quite a step beyond our fearsome archetype, the Frankenstein monster. That creature was supposedly produced by re-animating a sewn-together collection of bits of corpses. Certain partial successes in the synthetic life area have been analogous to this. But the goal is to create living cells from chemicals, not from various bits taken from other cells.
The rub comes if the creators of synthetic life endow it with the ability to reproduce; the ability to evolve will come along as baggage immediately. At that point, no matter what precautions they may take, SynLife (not my term: Google yields 3,770 hits) will most certainly escape into "our" environment, evolve so as to take advantage of it, and then we'll REALLY learn what it is like to live with invasive alien species! Sparrows, multiflora roses, and zebra mussels will probably pale by comparison.
I suggest that, really early on, SynLife cells be presented as a challenge to a large variety of prokaryotes, so they'll have a chance to develop resistance mechanisms and chemicals that we can later exploit when we need AntiSynBiotics!!
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