How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology

'Bold and intriguing.'--Wall Street Journal - 'Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.'--Publishers Weekly (starred review) - 'Offers plenty of food for thought.'--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 'Ball's marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.'--Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers. Biology is undergoing 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. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a