Creation - Softcover

Rutherford Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0670920460 ISBN 13: 9780670920464

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2013

Synopsis

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE: What is life? Where did it come from? In what form did it first appear? And how? Every creature, plant and cell that has ever inhabited the Earth owes its existence to the emergence, some four billion years ago, of a single life-form: the first ever living being, from which all other life subsequently evolved. Drawing on recent and dramatic advances in experimental biology, The Origin of Life takes us on a gripping, four-billion-year journey of discovery to explain exactly how such a thing could have happened. From interplanetary collisions to the inner-workings of cells and genes, it offers answers to the very grandest of questions before arriving at a thrilling solution to the greatest detective story of them all. THE FUTURE OF LIFE: Introducing a new chapter in human history: living technology. Our mastery of genetics now allows us to create entirely new life-forms within the laboratory - goats that produce spider silk in their milk, bacteria that excrete diesel, cells that identify and destroy tumours - offering tailor-made solutions to the crises of food shortage, pandemic disease and climate change.These living technologies can be downloaded for free or bought online in strands of ready-made DNA, using the equipment available in most student laboratories. But much remains unknown and this revolutionary technology is fraught with controversy, not least the fear of bioterrorism. The Future of Life introduces us to these remarkable innovations, explains how they work, explores the risks as well as the possibilities they afford, and presents a powerful argument for their benefit to humankind.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Rutherford is an editor at Nature and presents programs for BBC Radio and television. A geneticist by training, he has a Ph.D. from University College London.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The first part of this book relates what’s been learned about the origin of life on earth; the second, what’s being done to modify existing life-forms and produce new ones. Though both are engaging, many may find the first more dazzling. Rutherford starts small, discussing the cell and how it is begotten, not created but ultimately taking in genetics and DNA as well as the earth’s physical history before life emerged from a microscopic chamber at the bottom of the sea, four million years ago. The second part lacks the first’s sweeping grandeur, being set in a much narrower time frame, the 30 years bioengineering has been with us. That’s long enough, however, to have seen gene-splicing give way to synthetic biology at the field’s cutting-edge as the spider-goat and biofuels have been supplanted in novelty by the successful copying by RNA of a molecule formed by swapping in a different amino acid for one of the four naturally found in the DNA sequence, which ultimately suggests a different basis for life, one that is created, not begotten by intelligent (human) design. Creation is the first book by this geneticist-journalist with two well-received BBC4 series, The Gene Code and The Cell, to his credit. May it augur many more top-drawer science books by Rutherford. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Viking
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670920460
• ISBN 13: 9780670920464
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 355