Preview
  • Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

  • By: Carl Zimmer
  • Narrated by: Joe Ochman
  • Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

By: Carl Zimmer
Narrated by: Joe Ochman
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $21.52

Buy for $21.52

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

'Profound, lyrical, and fascinating, Life’s Edge will give you a newfound appreciation for life itself. It is the work of a master science writer at the height of his skills.' – Ed Yong, author of An Immense World

We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world – from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses – the harder they find it to locate the edges of life, where it begins and ends. What exactly does it mean to be alive? Is a virus alive? Is a foetus?

Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts – whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.

Life’s Edge is a fascinating investigation by one of the most celebrated science writers of our time. Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr Frankenstein’s monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.

©2021 Penguin Randomhouse LLC (P)2021 Macmillan Publishers International Ltd
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.