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What Is Life?: Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

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.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #180609 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-04-01
  • Released on: 2008-04-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 208 pages

Editorial Reviews

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.)
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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

Customer Reviews

Updated Answer to a Big Question5
"What is the meaning of life?" is a question all must ponder at some point or other. But that's too fancy; try the even more basic, "What is life?" In 1944, Nobel prizewinner and quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger published a small book with that question as a title, and it has been enormously influential, cited and debated ever since. There have even been other books with the same title since then, trying to definitively corral a huge and amorphous subject. Now science writer Ed Regis has added another, to take in the philosophical and biological efforts of our times: _What Is Life?: Investigating the Nature of Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). My guess is that it is not going to be the last book of the title; the definition game demands that new discoveries and ideas have to play their roles in our understanding of what life is. However, we are on the brink of making cells out of basic molecules, and Regis has a good introduction for those of us who are living through an extraordinary time in experimental molecular biology.

Schrödinger's book was a last stand against vitalism, the idea that there was something going on within creatures, organs, and cells that science could not understand. Life chemistry was thoroughly within known laws of thermodynamics. If what goes on in a cell is really only the jostling, linking, and breaking up of atoms and molecules, it makes sense that scientists could just get the right atoms and molecules together and get the whole thing going from scratch. The problem, of course, is that the whole mess is extraordinarily complicated even for the simplest of cells. Regis gives a good short history of how we came to know how complicated it all was. Definitions of life have been said to include necessarily reproduction (but mules are sterile, and are still alive) and also evolution (but evolved or evolving or not, any particular animal is still alive). What really needs to be taken into account in a definition of life is metabolism, the sum total of bodily chemical processes, including molecules into a body and molecules out of it. "Embodied metabolism" is, Regis writes, "at least as adequate as any other definition of life that has been offered to date." Adequate, but like any other definition, it gets iffy at the edges. What about viruses, that do have bodies, if you can call a chemical capsule a body, but are just inert chemically until they find a cell to latch upon and infect?

There is something disconcerting about just chemicals connecting and disconnecting being all there is to the living process. By some changes in degree, inert carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and the rest, eventually become living creatures, and even develop consciousness. And yet, vitalism is dead; "There must be more to life" is true on philosophical levels, but not biological or biochemical ones. That this is more clearly becoming true is shown in Regis's fascinating descriptions of current efforts in synthetic biology. Using synthetic gene sequences alone, scientists were able to manufacture a polio virus in 2002. Making a virus, which has characteristics both of being alive and inert, was one step; tinkering with living cells to rewire their function (like getting _E. coli_ to manufacture an antimalarial drug) is another sort of step, and also has the potential for becoming a big business. Making a cell from scratch, though, is the goal of firms like ProtoLife, whose business plan "is founded on an attempt to start life over, to begin from the beginning." ProtoLife's goal of creating artificial cells is not just so that we will learn more about how natural genetics and metabolism work and regulate themselves, though we are sure to do that along the way. ProtoLife is in it for the money, hoping someday to sell manufactured cells that might produce drugs, clean up waste, grab carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and who knows what else. Regis's review cannot have the canonical status of Schrödinger's influential work, but serves wonderfully as a clearly written update and introduction to new ways of looking at a vital question.

A popular-science writer explores basic questions4
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.

Regis is missing a great opportunity3
I started reading the last chapter of this interesting summary of the What Is Life - debate with great expectations. But got rather disappointed.
Why did Regis not take the opportunity to, at least, present some of the recent views based on a more holistisk biology/physics consideration ?
When settling for the metabolic explanation he could as well have called it the 2nd - thermodynamic - law - explanation?
Shouldn't he have give ample recognition to the `life is a particular pattern of energy flow/transformation' expressed in: Into The Cool by Schneider/Sagan; instead of pretending that he had not read that account?
Then an idea on how `life' started -- simultaneously with the Big Bang, or Big Bounce, if you want -- and that the entropy production and feeding on neg - entropy reality defines the starting point as well as what so many call `life'.
This debate needs such a broadening.
Ake Eckerwall