molecular biology

Book review – The Evolutionary Origins of Life and Death

9-minute read
keywords: abiogenesis, cell biology, evolutionary biology

In this second foray into the biology of death, I will examine programmed cell death or PCD. You might have heard of the process of apoptosis, but, as the previously reviewed The Biology of Death mentioned, this is just one of many ways in which cells can actively kill themselves. It is a vital part of life in multicellular organisms, for instance sculpting our hands so that we are not born with webs of skin between our fingers, or allowing leaves to fall from the trees in autumn by triggering cell death in so-called abscission zones. These are small sacrifices to serve the larger organism. Surprisingly, single-celled (unicellular) organisms also show PCD. But wait, is that not tantamount to suicide? How did that evolve?

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Book review – The Biology of Death: How Dying Shapes Cells, Organisms, & Populations

7-minute read
keywords: biomedicine, molecular biology

Though humans have shrouded it in ritual, cultural, and religious meaning, death is fundamentally a biological phenomenon. As both a biologist and someone with an abiding interest in the gothic subculture, death has thus never been a topic I shy away from. Two recent books, The Biology of Death (2022), and The Evolutionary Origins of Life and Death (first published in 2020), provided the perfect excuse to indulge my morbid curiosity.

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Book review – Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

7-minute read
keywords: genetics, history of science, molecular biology

The word biology derives from the Greek words bíos (βίος in Greek), meaning “life”, and -logía (-λογία in Greek), meaning “branch of study”, and is usually defined as “the study of life”. But what is life? Remarkably, biologists cannot agree on a definition. Everyone can name clear examples of living and non-living things. However, as so often in biology, there is no sharp demarcation between the two. There is a grey area where things are, well, somewhat alive? Lifelike? It is these borderlands between life and non-life that famous science writer and journalist Carl Zimmer explores in Life’s Edge. Instead of providing an answer, this intellectually stimulating and rewarding book will help you understand why it is such a hard question to begin with.

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Book review – Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome

DNA has lodged itself in the public imagination as the “blueprint” of life and as other, often slightly deceiving, metaphors. But what happens next? How do organisms actually get anything done with the information coded in DNA? For biologists, this is standard textbook fare: DNA is copied into single-stranded RNA which is then translated, three letters at a time, into amino acids that, when strung together, make up the workhorses of the cell: proteins. The cell organ, or organelle, that does the latter part is the ribosome, which Venki Ramakrishnan introduces here in Gene Machine. He has written a riveting first-hand account of the academic race to describe its structure, and how, in the process, he bagged a shared Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009.

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