“In the end, respiration and burning are equivalent; the slight delay in the middle is what we know as life.”
This quote, from
Nick Lane’s book The Vital Question (2015), is both poetic and true, which is the mark of great popular science writing.
What Lane’s book attempts to do (and in my opinion succeeds in doing) is to
radically change our perspective on life by showing us the crucial role played
by energy.
Lane is a biochemist at University College London and already the author of three books. I think there’s something to be said about popular science written by scientists, as opposed to science journalists, in the sense that they can sometimes achieve much more than educating. For example, they can fundamentally change our understanding of some topics (that certainly happened to me on some occasions). Actually, reading The Vital Question reminded me of reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene many years ago, and Lane’s book did for me with biochemistry what Dawkins did with genetics and evolutionary theory: it opened a window into a fascinating new landscape.
