Preview
  • How Life Works

  • A User’s Guide to the New Biology
  • By: Philip Ball
  • Narrated by: Philip Ball
  • Length: 17 hrs and 40 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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How Life Works

By: Philip Ball
Narrated by: Philip Ball
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Publisher's summary

Enticingly read by the author, Philip Ball.

'
An essential primer on humanity’s ongoing quest to understand the secrets of life . . . Excellent . . . Ball is a terrific writer.' – Adam Rutherford, The Guardian

A cutting-edge new vision of biology that proposes to revise our concept of what life is – from Science Book Prize winner Philip Ball.


Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.

In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the nature of life, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Philip Ball (P)2023 Macmillan Publishers International Limited
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Critic reviews

Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep . . . How Life Works has exciting implications for the future of the science of biology itself. I could not put it down. (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction)
Ball has the rare ability to explain scientific concepts across very diverse disciplines. . . . He explains the turn away from a purely mechanical view of life to one that embraces the inherently dynamic, complex, multilayered, interactive, and cognitive nature of the processes by which life sustains and regenerates itself. (James Shapiro, author of Evolution)
Offers a much-needed examination of exciting, cutting-edge findings in contemporary biology that is likely to dramatically transform our understanding of living systems (Daniel J. Nicholson, coeditor of Everything Flows)

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