Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

The author made justice to the concepts. The book is technically a big heavy and hard to grasp if you’re new to it. The book is a good read for understanding how researchers are gearing towards finding origin of life in labs.

tiny margins and poor quality print.

Absolutely fascinating subject! If you ever wondered HOW plants make energy out of sunlight and air, and build themselves carbon houses with it, this is the book for you. I picked up this book without ever having heard of the Krebs cycle or the reverse Krebs cycle or the scientists who worked out the chemistry. Well, now I have. Lane does more than just explain the chemistry. He puts a face on it. He doesn't only tell us what these scientists discovered, he tells us about the experiments, the successful ones and the ones that failed, the decades of slogging into blind alleys, the accidents of history, the personal lives of the scientists who worked out the intricate chemistry that has given us this world of life that we know today. I'm really enjoying this book.

Profundo y Claro. Brutalmente Directo, como suele ser Nick Lane. Aquellos que gustan de los temas de bioquímica ,actual y evolucionista, Nick Lane ofrece narraciones sensacionales y bien documentadas.

I hoped to like this book: I'm interested in it's (eventual) thesis that the mechanisms of respiration recapitulate the conditions under which multi-cellular life arose. I'm also intrigued by his argument that a better understanding of biological structures and energy flows will contribute more to an understanding of life, ageing and disease than further refinements of the (now) dominant genetic/information-theory approach. But I've been dissuaded by the first chapter (!) of this book from continuing. I'm not a bioscientist (or chemist) but I have some understanding of the main outlines of respiration and the role of mitochondria. I am glad to report that Lane is enthusiastic about his subject and not afraid to discuss difficult biochemistry with the general reader. But he does a poor job of explaining the myriad details he thinks important about the basic chemistry of the Krebs cycle that lies at the heart of his thesis. His approach (in the first chapter) is to trace the historical development of today's understanding of the complex chemistry and physics involved in the transformation of food (sugars) to energy that form one half of the Krebs function. Unfortunately this historical approach means mixing up some abbreviated descriptions of the chemistry as it is now understood with the errors and misdirections taken by the key researchers as the figured out what was going on over the past century. It's all very well to indulge praise of his heroes, but Lane seems to forget that he has to take a few "clod-hoppers" along with him on the journey. They (we) are becoming more puzzled, not more illuminated, by the stops and starts and sudden bursts of discovery his account contains and we’re stumbling over the knotty strings of chemical transformations (and “magic roundabouts”) that comprise his account of the Krebs cycle. Near the end of the first Chapter, Lane comes at last to the crucial question of the synthesis of ATP downstream from the Krebs cycle. This is the key energy 'bundle' made by the mitochondrion that powers the rest of the organism. But Lane compresses his explanation of the physics of 'bundling' bio-energy into a brief diagram (with arrows and ion valences) and its incomprehensible caption about quantum tunnelling, turbine 'motors' and 'proton-motive forces'. I lost all hope, at this point, that Lane would somehow clarify the the chemical soup of succinates, pyruvates, carboxylic acid and acetates that he kept sloshing around. I gave up.

So much to learn. Clearly presented insights into origin of life.

Life is amazing and this is a really good introduction to how it works at the most basal level.