Amazon Book Description
- A cutting-edge new vision of biology that proposes to revise our concept of what life is – from Science Book Prize winner Philip Ball.
- Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.
- In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.
- Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the nature of life, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.
- 'An essential primer on humanity’s ongoing quest to understand the secrets of life . . . Excellent . . . Ball is a terrific writer.'
→ Adam Rutherford, The Guardian
- 'Ball is a ferociously gifted science writer . . . There is so much [here] that is amazing . . . urgent . . . astonishing.'
→ The Sunday Times
- Ball has the rare ability to explain scientific concepts across very diverse disciplines. . . . He explains the turn away from a purely mechanical view of life to one that embraces the inherently dynamic, complex, multilayered, interactive, and cognitive nature of the processes by which life sustains and regenerates itself.
→ James Shapiro, author of Evolution
Inside Cover Blurb
- A new vision of the workings of life for the 21st century
- Over the last twenty years, biology has undergone a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works - the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more - have been exposed as incomplete, misleading or wrong. The popular narratives of biology have not kept pace with these changes; instead we have been encouraged to view the processes of life as a black box within which the details are too dizzyingly complicated to contemplate.
- How Life Works opens up that black box and shows life to be far richer and more ingenious than we had guessed. It explains that there is no single place to look for the answer to how life works; life is a hierarchical system of many levels, each with its own rules and principles: genes, proteins, cells, tissues and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system.
- With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living entities, tissues and organisms. We can reprogram cells to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we continue to discover the rules that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more profound. Some researchers believe that ultimately this will enable us to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even to create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.
- How Life Works proposes nothing less than a new view of the life sciences. Informed by cutting-edge research and drawing on ideas that are only now just beginning to reach the scientific literature, it will ultimately revise our concept of what life itself is.
- Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including:-
→ The Book of Minds,
→ H2O: A Biography of Water,
→ Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour,
→ The Music Instinct, and
→ Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything.
His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He lives in London.
Contents
Prologue – 1
- The End of the Machine: A New View of Life – 19
- Genes: What DNA Really Does – 45
- RNA and Transcription: Reading the Message – 105
- Proteins: Structure and Unstructure – 139
- Networks: The Webs That Make Us – 185
- Cells: Decisions, Decisions – 229
- Tissues: How to Build, When to Stop – 267
- Bodies: Uncovering the Pattern – 299
- Agency: How Life Gets Goals and Purposes – 335
- Troubleshooting: Rethinking Medicine – 379
- Making and Hacking: Redesigning Life – 413
Epilogue – 445
Acknowledgments – 461
Source Notes – 465
Bibliography – 471
Index – 515
Denis Noble: Review in Nature
- For too long, scientists have been content in espousing the lazy metaphor of living systems operating simply like machines, says science writer Philip Ball in How Life Works. Yet, it’s important to be open about the complexity of biology — including what we don’t know — because public understanding affects policy, health care and trust in science. “So long as we insist that cells are computers and genes are their code,” writes Ball, life might as well be “sprinkled with invisible magic”. But, reality “is far more interesting and wonderful”, as he explains in this must-read user’s guide for biologists and non-biologists alike.
- When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, many thought that it would prove to be an ‘instruction manual’ for life. But the genome turned out to be no blueprint. In fact, most genes don’t have a pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence.
- Instead, genes’ activity — whether they are expressed or not, for instance, or the length of protein that they encode — depends on myriad external factors, from the diet to the environment in which the organism develops. And each trait can be influenced by many genes. For example, mutations in almost 300 genes have been identified as indicating a risk that a person will develop schizophrenia.
- It’s therefore a huge oversimplification, notes Ball, to say that genes cause this trait or that disease. The reality is that organisms are extremely robust, and a particular function can often be performed even when key genes are removed. For instance, although the HCN4 gene encodes a protein that acts as the heart’s primary pacemaker, the heart retains its rhythm even if the gene is mutated1.
- Another metaphor that Ball criticizes is that of a protein with a fixed shape binding to its target being similar to how a key fits into a lock. Many proteins, he points out, have disordered domains — sections whose shape is not fixed, but changes constantly.
- This “fuzziness and imprecision” is not sloppy design, but an essential feature of protein interactions. Being disordered makes proteins “versatile communicators”, able to respond rapidly to changes in the cell, binding to different partners and transmitting different signals depending on the circumstance. For example, the protein aconitase can switch from metabolizing sugar to promoting iron intake to red blood cells when iron is scarce. Almost 70% of protein domains might be disordered.
- Classic views of evolution should also be questioned. Evolution is often regarded as “a slow affair of letting random mutations change one amino acid for another and seeing what effect it produces”. But in fact, proteins are typically made up of several sections called modules — reshuffling, duplicating and tinkering with these modules is a common way to produce a useful new protein.
- Later in the book, Ball grapples with the philosophical question of what makes an organism alive. Agency — the ability of an organism to bring about change to itself or its environment to achieve a goal — is the author’s central focus. Such agency, he argues, is attributable to whole organisms, not just to their genomes. Genes, proteins and processes such as evolution don’t have goals, but a person certainly does. So, too, do plants and bacteria, on more-simple levels — a bacterium might avoid some stimuli and be drawn to others, for instance. Dethroning the genome in this way contests the current standard thinking about biology, and I think that such a challenge is sorely needed.
- Ball is not alone in calling for a drastic rethink of how scientists discuss biology. There has been a flurry of publications in this vein in the past year, written by me and others. All outline reasons to redefine what genes do. All highlight the physiological processes by which organisms control their genomes. And all argue that agency and purpose are definitive characteristics of life that have been overlooked in conventional, gene-centric views of biology.
- This burst of activity represents a frustrated thought that “it is time to become impatient with the old view”, as Ball says. Genetics alone cannot help us to understand and treat many of the diseases that cause the biggest health-care burdens, such as schizophrenia, cardiovascular diseases and cancer. These conditions are physiological at their core, the author points out — despite having genetic components, they are nonetheless caused by cellular processes going awry. Those holistic processes are what we must understand, if we are to find cures.
- Ultimately, Ball concludes that “we are at the beginning of a profound rethinking of how life works”. In my view, beginning is the key word here. Scientists must take care not to substitute an old set of dogmas with a new one. It’s time to stop pretending that, give or take a few bits and pieces, we know how life works. Instead, we must let our ideas evolve as more discoveries are made in the coming decades. Sitting in uncertainty, while working to make those discoveries, will be biology’s great task for the twenty-first century.
→ Nature 626, 254-255 (2024)
→ Ref: "Noble (Raymond) & Noble (Denis) - Understanding Living Systems" (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2023).
Book Comment
Picador; Pan Macmillan. (18 Jan. 2024). Hardcover.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)